


Slip Inside This House

by eon_s



Category: IT (1990), IT - Stephen King
Genre: 1970s, Alternate Universe - Psychedelic Dreams, Animal Death, Anxiety, Body Horror, Childhood Trauma, Consensual Sex, Counterculture, Death, Deus Ex Machina, Deus Ex Machina 2: Once More With Feeling, Dirty Talk, Drug Use, Eastern religions (and the 70s cherry-picking you might expect), Eddie Kaspbrak & Richie Tozier Bantering, Everyone Has Issues, Friendship, Group Sex, Hallucinations, Hippies, Horror, Internalized Homophobia, Jungian synchronicity, LSD, Love Confessions, M/M, Madness, Marijuana, Memory Loss, Miniseries Eddie Kaspbrak, Mushrooms, Musical References, Near Death Experiences, Not Underage, Period Typical Attitudes, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Horror, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Road Trips, Self-Esteem Issues, Sloppy Makeouts, Symbolism, Vietnam War, Virgin Eddie Kaspbrak, also its me writing this so you get an extra serving of nihilism with your buddhist allegory, also mike spent the time he wasn't in Derry serving in Vietnam, bad trip-sitting etiquette, copious references to The Holy Mountain, crossing the country in a volkswagen bus, happy ending of a sort i guess, impending doom, it just keeps getting weirder, it'll get dark before it gets... less dark, it's done now woohoo, lots of historical and cultural references, namely to the 13th floor elevators, plot devices have never been so contrived, pre nose job!richie, psychonaut!richie, random texans, raunchy unprotected 70s sex, so much love, spoilers for the end of the Holy Mountain which honestly I should have tagged earlier, still living with mama, sure lets say that, very bad trips with specific warnings for them that you can skip safely but they get very dark, vibrating beds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-20
Updated: 2021-03-12
Packaged: 2021-03-17 13:08:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 50,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29593278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eon_s/pseuds/eon_s
Summary: Richie comes back in the summer of 1973, tall and grown-up looking with a moustache, a shaggy mop of rust-coloured hair, and a VW bus he’s been road-tripping in.(Or, the one where Eddie's the Loser who stayed behind, Richie sees IT again after dropping acid, and two traumatized men attempt to un-fuck their minds with psychedelic transcendence while childhood, half-remembered, sends forth old ghosts to claw out their third eyes.)
Relationships: Ben Hanscom/Beverly Marsh, Bill Denbrough/Audra Phillips, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Minor or Background Relationship(s), Patricia Blum Uris/Stanley Uris
Comments: 35
Kudos: 25





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Mostly mini-series!verse with bits of book!verse (I'm audio-booking my way through it as I write this because I can't read for shit.) Mini-series timeline though, so in '73 the Losers are all roughly 24-25 or thereabouts.)
> 
> I've tried to run things by the IT wiki to make sure any headcanons don't take us off on too improbable a tangent, given as I'm only 1/4 of the way through the book, and mainly going off of the mini-series. But there's also going to be deviation in order to make this work out so think of it as like... one part IT, one part The Holy Mountain, one part... something else. So there are memory issues... sort of. Things work differently... sort of. Idk I'm just running with a vibe here. I don't want to overwork it. So buckle in and we'll see where it goes - at the very least, you'll get (eventual) porn.
> 
> It's IT but on acid. Also there's gay shit. That's it, that's the fic.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you want to listen along:
> 
> Slip Inside this House - 13th Floor Elevators (1967)
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwSA0Tckwbk

* * *

_There is no season when you are grown_  
_You are always risen from the seeds you've sown_  
_There is no reason to rise alone_  
_Other stories given have sages of their own._

\- "Slip Inside This House" - 13th Floor Elevators

* * *

Richie comes back in the autumn of 1973, tall and grown-up looking with a moustache, a shaggy mop of rust-coloured hair, and a VW bus he’s been road-tripping in. Eddie is eternally grateful he was the one to answer the phone when Richie called ahead, heralding his arrival.

“Round up the gang, Spaghetti – I come bearing gifts and stories from the far reaches of sunny Califor-nigh-yay.”

“Richie, the gang’s all gone,” Eddie reminds him, uncomfortable, anxious, his memory prickling uneasily in the places it’s most blurry. He winds the cord of the landline around his finger over and over. “Everyone moved away. It’s just me. You must’ve known that.”

Richie falters. “You’re right. I just – got confused there a minute. Of course, the gang’s all spread out – I only just went and saw ‘em.”

There’s an uneasy pause, then Richie laughs, brash, loud.

“Well, I’m happy to see just you, Eds. Come and meet me on the road into town – I’ll pick you up. It’ll be like you’re hitching a ride.”

Eddie doesn’t want to go stand alone by the side of a road surrounded by woods and, likely, bugs, but he has no power to resist the sudden overwhelming flood of charm Richie’s forced back into his otherwise dreary life.

He leaves a note for his mother – at a church group meeting – tells her he’s just gone into town for some groceries and not to worry. Promises he’s brought his medicine along. He really guilds the lily – better to butter Ma up too much than not enough.

At least it’s fall, which is good in as much as the flies and mosquitos are still few and far between, but the mud is enough to make Eddie incredibly glad he’s got his slacks tucked into rubber boots. He stands on the shoulder and alternates between watching the leaves fall and peering up the road to see if Richie’s coming along. Richie hadn’t said what car he’d be driving – only that Eddie ‘couldn’t miss it.’ When the bus appears, cherry red and shining like a ruby, Eddie feels a strange rush of adrenaline he can’t quite place.

“Stick your thumb out, Eds, or I’ll pass you,” Richie calls from the open window, laughing like a madman. Eddie feels like an idiot, but he obeys, lifting his thumb begrudgingly as the bus rolls to a stop.

“Sorry – my boots are –”

Eddie falls silent when he sees the inside of the bus. It’s deceptively plain on the outside, but the interior is another matter entirely. Every inch of it has been painted by hand, decorated with flowers, fractals, repeating patterns of dots and lines. There’s a nude woman – a very detailed nude woman – painted on the ceiling. There’s a flower between her legs where her… womanness should be. There are little knickknacks everywhere, too – tiny prisms, sea glass, bottle caps all strung up as garlands. A bunch of flattened utensils are clanging together like a poor man’s wind-chime. There are rugs upon rugs, cushions upon cushions, and the air smells spiced and heady, murky and dank. Marijuana. Incense. Richie, laughter turning to a fond smile that crinkles the corners of his eyes.

“Eddie Spaghetti, as I live and breathe. You sure grew up, didn’t you?”

His shirt’s top three buttons are open, and his chest hair curls copper against his pale skin. His grin widens and Eddie blushes – sure he’s been caught staring.

“You’re one to talk,” he says softly, embarrassed.

“Hop on in here, pally.”

“My boots –”

“Just sit side-saddle. Dangle your boots out the door.”

“What and – and drive with the door open?”

Eddie can’t help how scandalized he sounds at the thought of that.

“Relax, Eddie, I’ve done it a thousand times. Hang on to your hat - what belts we've got in this baby haven't worked since '68,” Richie declares, and hits the gas before Eddie’s even settled into his seat. He falls back against it with an ‘oof’ of discomfort. Grimacing, he arranges himself with difficulty in the seat, trying to keep mud off the upholstery.

“So, what have you been up to, anyway? Gone anywhere fun? Got married, maybe? Stan did, you know. Get married, I mean.”

“Good for him,” Eddie says and means it. “Did you meet her?”

“Mrs. Stanley Uris? Sure did. I’ll be honest, Eddie, she can be a bit of a priss over some things – dirty jokes mostly. She’s not a fan, at least not when I tell them. Stan says she’s more receptive when it’s coming from him – well, I should hope so, I told him, I said, Stan, you don’t need to tell me twice. I’m just running my mouth, you know, I’m not trying to mosey in on whatever marital… stuff they get up to. If listening to Stan tell the one about the albino and the shepherd does it for her, well, more power to her...”

“Right.”

Eddie is in sensory overload. Jostling as the bus bumps and shudders over the uneven road, knees knocking into each other, he is overwhelmed by the frenetic energy that is Richie Tozier, all guns blazing. It’s the antithesis to the cold, bitter silence he lives with at home. Ma and he don’t speak much beyond pleasantries, and only then out of habit. What’s to say? They know each other too well to need to speak. They stay out of each other’s way in quiet synchronicity, two halves of a single organism that's slowly driving itself crazy.

“I tell you, it is good to be where the road’s been leading at last.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Eddie asks, and sounds more petulant than a grown man should.

“Nothing. Maybe. Hard to say. I saw something… you know? A glimmer of… a fragment. In a dream. Not quite a dream.”

Richie glances over and chuckles.

“There were… substances involved.”

Eddie can’t say he’s surprised.

“Something… just pulled me, pulled me right out of my life and set me on the road. Go East, young man - something like that. Somehow I just… I know it ends here. Don’t ask me why, but I do.”

Eddie doesn’t know what to say to that, so he doesn’t say anything. Instead, he changes the subject.

“Where are you going to stay while you’re in Derry? Have you booked a room yet?”

“I was just going to camp out in front of your house,” Richie replies, looking surprised. “Why, is that… not an option?”

Eddie opens and closes his mouth as he attempts to picture the vehicle sitting there while his mother looks on in horror and condemnation.

“Relax, Eds. I’m joking – I’ve rented a room in town. God damn, you’re wound up tighter than a drum, you know that? I mean, you’ve always been, a bit, but you’re giving off all kinds of vibes, man.”

“I’m just cold,” Eddie replies. “You made me wait on the side of the road for half an hour. In October.”

“Isn’t cold air supposed to be good for – shit!”

Something fleshy and medium-sized thwacks hard into the front bumper of the bus. Richie breaks fast, and it sends Eddie flying into the dashboard.

“Ow!” he yelps, cupping his mouth and pulling his fingers away. Red.

“Shit – you bleeding?”

Richie’s in his face, then, too close, too much, smelling like grass and sweat, all mingled with the iron tang beading on the seam of Eddie’s mouth.

“Damn it. Now I’ve got a fat lip – Ma’s never going to let me hear the end of it.”

He searches his pockets for a handkerchief, but Richie beats him to it, offering him a bandana pulled from somewhere behind his seat. Eddie eyes it dubiously.

“Oh, go on. It’s clean enough.”

Cringing, Eddie dabs the paisley fabric against his torn skin and twists back around, facing forward.

“So… what do you think we hit?” he asks finally. “A dog?”

“Maybe we hit a baby bigfoot,” Richie shrugs. “Only one way to find out.”

He opens the driver’s side door before Eddie can tell him not to and hops out, flared jeans clinging tight to his thighs. Eddie watches the muscles in his quadriceps working as he walks slowly around to the front of the bus.

“Shit,” Richie says. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”

“What?”

Eddie can’t take it – the air is too close, too cloying, too heavily perfumed. He shoves his way to freedom, to fresh air, and takes gulps like a drowning man until he spots it – the steadily expanding rivulets of blood expanding across the ground.

He isn’t sure what he expects to see, but it isn’t a mass of grey fur matted crimson, legs akimbo, all splayed wrong.

It’s a wolf. And it’s still breathing.

“What’s a wolf doing here?” Eddie asks, urgency pulling at his vocal chords. Something about this strikes him as unnatural. “We don’t have wolves in Derry. None that I’ve ever heard of, at least.”

“It’s not dying,” Richie hisses, his voice hoarse. “Oh sweet Christ. We can’t – we can’t just leave it like this.”

Eddie’s eyes go wide.

“No – no, Richie, you can’t be serious –”

“As a heart attack, Spaghetti man.” He looks from the wolf to Eddie, then back to the wolf. “Go to the glove compartment. Get me what’s inside.”

Eddie feels like a puppet moved along by strings as he obeys. His stomach drops when he sees the contents of the little storage space.

“A handgun? Richie –”

“Give it to me.”

He doesn’t sound like Richie, not properly, when he’s not laughing. This stony, solemn voice feels like it belongs to someone else. Eddie hands him the gun, then turns away.

“It’s not whimpering,” he wonders aloud. “Why’s it so quiet?”

The ensuing bang makes him jump half out of his skin. He turns back around and really does lose it, then, racing over to the shoulder to throw up off the side of the road.

“What the hell’s wrong with it’s face?”

Richie turns the animal’s head slightly with the toe of his shoe.

“Looks like some kind of birth defect, if I had to guess,” he says at last. “Two muzzles – Siamese twins, maybe?”

“Oh, God, it’s horrible!”

“Well… we probably did it a favour. Poor thing must’ve been in a lot of pain,” Richie murmurs uneasily.

Eddie refuses to touch the thing, so Richie has to roll it to the side of the road with a fallen branch. Once it’s out of the way, he inspects his front bumper and swears.

“Damn – that dent’ll need hammering out.”

“Let’s just get out of here and worry about the dent later,” Eddie presses, casting a final, nervous glance at the abomination in the dirt.

“Yeah, alright.”

The rest of the drive is uneventful, but the silence is thick and curdled, sitting in Eddie’s stomach like bad milk. He tightens his arms around himself and forces his eyes to stay glued to the passing buildings – the peeling paint and dipping roofs of a town in a time of scarcity. Anything to forget how that thing had smiled up at him, twin grins, all white teeth and black gums ringed with red.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some initial notes:
> 
> It is becoming clear that IT can be interacted with to some extent, or at least remembered, in the 'off season' between killing sprees in this fic. No need to wait the 27 years here. The only thing that you have to do is take some hallucinogens to get the ball rolling. Also, despite living in Derry, Eddie at this point still has a fuck ton of brain fog about it all.
> 
> Also: This thing is getting weirder. And more Holy Mountain-y.
> 
> Also also: Trigger warning for the use of the g slur in a quote of some song lyrics that are tonally necessary for the piece, but also a product of when they were written (in the 60s.) You've been warned. Also there are notes at the end of the chapter to clarify some other stuff for anyone reading this who isn't already a big psychedelics user/aficionado.

* * *

_Twice born gypsies care and keep_   
_The nowhere of their former home_   
_They slip inside this house as they pass by._

_\- "Slip Inside This House" - 13th Floor Elevators_

* * *

Derry hasn’t changed much since the gang disbanded, and none of the ways it _has_ changed have made it any more desirable a place to be. There is still an air of stagnation, of dry rot, of woodworm that permeates everything. The town feels like it’s sick, like it’s dying, like it’s _been_ dying, for years, and nobody’s bothered to treat the spreading infection. If Richie notices, he pretends not to. The optimism has a falseness, a desperate edge to it that makes Eddie feel profoundly uncomfortable.

The day after his return, Richie and Eddie eat lunch in a sad diner in town, clothes sticking to the peeling plasticized seats. It’s taken all morning for Eddie to get away – as predicted, his mother had gone off like an atom bomb at him for the fat lip. He had to wait until she went down for a nap – age has taken its toll on the stamina of Sonia Kaspbrak – a small, but cherished, blessing. Now, he gorges himself on over-sweet, under-cooked cherry pie and burnt coffee, listening to Richie fill him in on how the gang’s been keeping, and filling him in on the non-news of their tepid, languishing little stasis-oasis of a town. That’s what Richie dubs it, between mouthfuls of a milkshake he is, repulsively, dipping French fries into.

“It’s a stasis oasis – the one little pocket of the universe where nothing ever gets any better or gets any different.”

It’s the first time he’s outwardly acknowledged how fucking _miserable_ Derry is, and Eddie is surprised by how much the comment soothes him, like he’s been inwardly waiting for some kind of confirmation that Richie can see it too, that Eddie’s not just losing his damn mind from being stuck in the house with his mother for two decades and change.

“So why’d you come back?”

Eddie doesn’t mean for it to sound so… angry, so accusatory, but seeing Richie in the flesh again feels like digging into the tender, wet meat beneath a scab and scrambling it, pulling out pulpy tissue and slimy exudate.

“I told you – I had to.”

“Yeah. You had a vision – the wise prophet Richie Tozier and his traveling pharmacy – please, spare me.”

“Whoa, whoa, _whoa._ What’s this all about? Why are you giving me the third degree about this?”

“I’m not – this is hardly the third degree. Third degree would be asking, oh, I don’t know – why you stopped writing, or why you decided to involve me in your little vision quest, or why you thought you could just – just _swan in here_ like some… like some damn long-hair –”

“Oh, I’m a ‘long-hair’ now? Jesus, Eddie. Do you know how much you sound like your mother?”

That shuts him up quick enough.

“As it happens, there is more to all of this than what I’ve told you,” Richie admits, “but it is not the kind of story you can just tell.”

“You’re at a loss for words?”

“Cautious, more like. That… wolf… thing. It’s not the first time I’ve seen something like that. There was one before. During my last trip.”

Eddie shudders. The movement is involuntary, a convulsion. He stares at the cloudy metal of his cutlery, the cherry filling of his pie suddenly sanguine and grotesque.

“What do you want me to say?” he pleads finally, words falling curled and shriveled from his lips, dead leaves blanketing the growing chasm he feels yawning beneath him.

“I know – this sounds crazy coming from me – but I don’t think it’s a question of saying. I think it’s a question of seeing. I’ve got stuff, you know – bits and pieces gathered on the road. I’ve got it all in a shoe box in the bus. I think… I think I was supposed to bring it here.”

Eddie pushes his blood pie away, disgusted.

“You’re right. You do sound crazy.”

“Just… trust me. Please. Don’t make me beg, Eds. I’ll do it, but… please.”

Eddie’s never seen Richie so serious, so solemn, so –

But that’s not true. Objectively false, W – R – O – N – G as the day is L – O – N – G he was PALE, BLOODLESS, FISH-BELLY WHITE with red rimmed eyes owlish, rolling, and red pooled in his palm. Chalk white, bone white, corpse pale in the clammy dark, with a mouth open, screaming? Sobbing. Hot hand, bloodfull, and Eddie was powerless, paralyzed, terror like a noose around his neck, tightening, pressure in his head, his eyes _They’llsurelyburst!_ all full of tears. White flashes and hungry shadows, and Richie, serious, solemn, haunted in the grave-deep dark.

Eddie recoils, accidentally bringing his right palm down on his abandoned pie. The cherry smear across his palm breaks him out in gooseflesh. Richie is staring at him, and there’s something in that stare that Eddie hates. It gets up under his nails like he’s a prisoner of war and it’s a bamboo shard in the hands of the Viet Cong. It shoots pain up along his limbs until his skull is buzzing.

“The way you feel, Spaghetti man? That’s been chewing through to my marrow for the last five months.”

Something strange happens, then. An easy calm comes over the room, artificial as a sedative but twice as quick. Eddie feels like something’s come loose, excised, debrided. There’s a bit of the under-scab exposed, and the air is cool and soothing on the raw flesh. He wipes the cherry filling off his hand with slow, steady passes of a cheap paper napkin and watches Richie light up a smoke.

“For whatever it’s worth, I’m glad it’s you here to meet me.”

Richie says it small, like he’s scared of his own voice, and that’s so fundamentally _not-Richie_ that it sets one part of Eddie’s mind to frantic spiraling – _it’s him, it’s him, of course it’s him – who else could it be_? But it’s no good – something’s set him on edge. Something about this whole situation feels like he’s playing with a live grenade without the knowledge to know not to pull the pin.

“How’s Bill?” he ventures, tentatively setting the explosive down.

“Bill’s… Bill. He’s on another level than the rest of us mere mortals. He says he’s in an intake stage – he’s reading. When he’s not writing, he’s just… devouring books. He gave me some to take along – on the road. Said it came to him a year before I showed up. He’d been going all kinds of crazy with mescaline.”

“Bill? Bill Denbrough.”

Eddie finds it hard to picture his old friend under the influence. Richie, he could believe – Richie would try just about anything once, but _Bill?_

“Bill’s a regular desert sage – or he was, anyway. He and that English rose of his were living with this commune in the mountains near El Paso, if you’d believe it, last I heard.”

Eddie snorts at that, shaking his head.

“I can’t believe something like that without proof.”

“Well, Spaghetti man, if proof is what you want, then proof is what you shall get.”

Rising to his feet, Richie fishes some cash out of his pants pocket and leaves it on the table. Eddie opens his mouth to protest, but Richie shakes his head.

“Come on, man. Let’s go.”

They retire to the bus and drive to a quiet street where they’re unlikely to be bothered. Richie leaves Eddie up front to retrieve the mythic shoe-box, which, when he returns, he carries with reverence.

“Here we go – hold the lid, would you?”

Eddie holds the lid.

“Here… here’s one of Bill,” Richie says, and holds up a square photograph. It’s not well-composed – it’s overexposed and under-saturated, but Eddie can clearly make out the shape of a man who, he supposes, does look a bit like what he thinks Bill might’ve looked like as a boy but grown now, older. He sits, cross-legged on the ground, hands resting palms-upwards on his knees. A pretty young thing sits beside him, mostly naked but for a loosely draped shawl and a kaleidoscopic tangle of painted flowers and vines trailing over tanned skin. Audra. Her hair hangs past her shoulders, woven through with ribbons.

“He gave me this,” Richie says, and hands Eddie a slim, hard-cover volume.

“ 'The Doors of Perception' ?”

“He said he’s read it seven times. I’ve only managed to get through it once – not it’s fault, really. I’ve just been all… screwed up, lately. Oh, and there’s this.”

The next book is somewhat thicker, and the cover – a roughly drawn illustration of a tiny house dotting a rock-face – reveals little about its contents.

“ 'Mount Analogue' ?”

“Here, look at these.”

Richie is still digging through the box. He produces a small card, holds it out. It bears the hand-drawn image of some sort of Asian architecture that Eddie can’t identify. The surface of the paper is uneven, marked by scratches on the other side which, when Eddie turns it over, wind up being the hastily copied lines of a poem.

_The man alone with the lonely cloud clings to the mountainside_

_His spirit like water in old wells lies still, unshaken by any tremor_

\- Chu Văn An

Temple of Literature, Hanoi, drawn from memory for M. Hanlon, from a friend

“Mike says he met this translator – really smart guy who was working for the Americans – while he was over there. Dan-something? I don’t know. Think it was Dan. Anyway – the point is, he told Mike about this place up in Hanoi – The Temple of Literature, but Mike told me to think of it more like a university and less like an American church – anyway, that’s not the important part of this. This Dan guy, right, he figured it would be right up Mike’s alley, I guess. And he’d remembered a little piece of this poem and he translated it and stuck it on the back of his drawing. Now, my first thought at this point was what the hell is in the water in Vietnam that makes people’s memories sharp enough for that? Because there’s no way in hell you could get me to remember much by way of poetry beyond maybe There Was an Old Woman from Derry or other such limericks of high culture. But then I thought – what’s with this mountain thing? I mean, at this point, Bill’s gone all Desert-Fathers-meets-Terence-McKenna on us and given me his French mountain book. And now Mike’s giving me this stuff he picked up in Vietnam which this Dan guy supposedly said he gave Mike ‘because he felt like he was meant to.’ It’s weird, right? I mean, you gotta admit at least that it’s _weird,_ Eds.”

Eddie needs a minute to process the enthusiasm and information Richie’s pummeling him with. Richie doesn’t let him take it – he steamrolls along, pulling even more stuff out of Pandora’s shoe-box.

“It gets weirder. The last time I saw Bev was… well, okay, for one thing, I wound up with this,” Richie says, and fishhooks his mouth, pulling his lips back, revealing a metal filling, “because the shitstain boyfriend she was running with thought I was getting fresh.”

“What boyfriend?” Eddie asks, confused by how this relates to anything else.

“This big fucking sack of potatoes that squeezes his fat ass into a pair of leather pants tighter than a sausage casing and rides a motorcycle. He’s bad news, man – the scary kind of bad news.”

Eddie tries to imagine Bev running with bikers, but he can’t. In his mind, she’s still not yet grown and the image is jarring. Sick. Protectiveness flares like the end of Richie’s cigarette back in the diner, flame orange and blood red.

“He runs with some wannabe badasses, petty criminals – they’ve all got names like Beef, and Gun, and shit like that – I’m not kidding. Well, okay, I’m kidding with Beef, but there is a Gun, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a –”

“Beep, beep, Richie,” Eddie says automatically, and they both pause. Richie’s eyes widen, and his mouth pulls into a manic grin.

“It’s coming back to you, huh? How you guys used to say that?”

“I never forgot,” Eddie replies, blowing it off. Inside, though, inside he’s squirming, wriggling, a worm on a hook. Dishonestly leaves a metallic taste in his mouth.

“One of his buddies is a real nasty piece of work – actually got himself arrested _while I was there_ for pulling a gun on a guy at a burger joint. I wish I was kidding. This guy, when he was drunk, went on this whole rant about the ‘collective unconscious’ – well, in his case he explicitly said, ‘the collective Aryan unconscious.’ And I’m no academic, but I figured, that’s a pretty one-note reading of Carl Jung, because didn’t he also get all jazzed up on the _I Ching_ – because I knew that – I read part of it while I was at Bill’s. Well, that’s how I lost my tooth, anyway. Damn near knocked my jaw clean off -”

“I thought you said it was Bev's boyfriend who did that.”

“No - no he hit me the second time for looking at her too long. But the tooth got loosened by this other guy- and none of that matters anyway, look - the point is – something in that conversation stuck with me. When I got back on the road I went to a bookstore and I picked up a copy of the _I Ching_ – not the same copy, and this one didn’t have Jung’s forward, but it didn’t matter because I also picked up a copy of _Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle._ And it’s what’s happening here, Eddie, it has to be.”

“What’s happening here?”

“Synchronicity! Think about it – the mountain with Bill. The mountain with Mike. The – oh, fuck, well, I meant to say this earlier, would’ve made more sense – the name of the guy who knocked my tooth out _was Mountain._ There’s something… to all of this. Like a recurring theme – and it’s not just mountains either. It’s other shit, cropping up over and over and over again.”

Back into the box he goes. He pulls out something then that makes Eddie recoil and press his back up against the passenger-side door.

“Jesus, Richie, is that acid? You can’t just wave that round – what if somebody sees?”

“Stop yelling and just look, would you? Look at the pictures on the blotter paper.”

Eddie squints, leaning in a bit.

“It’s clowns,” he says, and bile rises in his throat.

“You bet your pretty little ass it’s clowns.”

He puts the tabs away, back into the crude little tinfoil envelope he’s storing them in.

“There’s more.”

“Richie, I don’t want to do this anymore,” Eddie pleads, chest tight. He gropes in his pocket for his inhaler, fear like a hand sealed over his nose and mouth.

“When I took one of these tabs, I tripped like I’ve never tripped in my life, Eds. I thought I was dying. The wolf kept coming around to maul me when I'd try to lie down - I felt it bite me down to my bones. I lost – I lost a week and a half. That’s not normal, by the way. One tab, for God’s sake. It shouldn’t be able to do that. When I came out of it, I was in Las Vegas.”

Eddie’s hands are shaking.

“No kidding.”

“I was – I was in Las Vegas, wearing a new shirt and pants. I had no idea how I’d gotten there. Two things happened immediately after I… woke up, I guess you could say. I won fifteen hundred dollars on the roulette wheel I was standing in front of, and I saw Ben Hanscom walking across the room.”

“In Las Vegas?”

“Yeah. He didn’t see me right away – I had to go over. Reintroduce myself. He said it was all a little foggy – because he was drinking, you know. End of term trip – unplanned. He and some college buddies just decided, fuck it, let’s get on a plane and go to Las Vegas. And they just happen to walk in to the same casino I just happen to come to in. And the casino? You’re not going to believe this Eddie. It was Circus Circus.”

Richie pins him with a gaze like a butterfly to a mounting board. Eddie’s mouth is dry, painfully dry, and all the rest of him is damp and sweaty.

“That’s… that’s crazy, Richie. You’re talking crazy.”

“Yeah,” he breathes, eyes ringed with white, sunken and dark beneath, like he’s spent ten years awake and running from some eternal nightmare. “Yeah, Spaghetti. I know.”

He sighs heavily and scrubs a hand over his face.

“After that, I… I went outside. My bus was just… sitting there. The keys were in my pocket. I took my fifteen hundred dollars and I started off tracking you all down. The only one that didn’t have some weird synchronicity shit going on was Stan - he told me I was losing my damn mind. But while I was driving away from his house? I saw balloons tied onto the mailbox of one of his neighbour's houses - kids birthday or something. And everyone else just had… weird, weird stuff, man.”

Eddie stares down at the photograph in his hand. Intrepid Bill, nomad sage, stares back, eyes unafraid but sober, shuttered. There is an oldness, a weariness to his eyes that Eddie feels in himself – the same exhaustion he sees in Richie.

“If there is something… _something_ going on… what can we do about it? I can’t even get a clear picture of all this in my head. My mind feels like it’s trying to move through wet cement.”

“I know,” Richie says. “I felt that way too – felt it for a long time. There’s ways you can fight it, though. Cleave a path through it.”

The implication needs no further elaboration.

“You mean drugs.”

“They’ll help you, Eds. They helped me.”

“I’m not having this conversation. You shouldn’t be having it either.”

“Eds – I could’ve gone to Ben with this, or Mike, or hell – I could’ve just stayed in the fucking desert with Bill and his fucking ego death obsession, but I didn’t. I came to you – and I didn’t do that because I had to, or because you’re the last one left in Derry – I did it because if I’m doing this – whatever _this is_ – if I’m following through, I _want it to be you._ Do you understand that?”

“No,” Eddie admits, “No, I don’t. Why _don’t_ you go with Bill and take your – your spiritual journeys with him? I can’t help you.”

“Maybe not, but I can help you. You _need_ it, Eds. You need it like I need it. Bill doesn’t need it – Bill’s off on his own road to enlightenment. Mike’s still trying to figure out who the hell he is when he’s not in a uniform. Stan’s married. Ben’s in school. Bev… Bev’s not in the kind of mental state you should be adding drugs to right now. You need this most. More than me, even. If I’m wrong, then get out of the bus and I won’t stop you.”

Eddie reaches for the door handle. He isn’t surprised when he can’t find the strength to push it open.

“Welcome aboard, Spaghetti man. Glad to have you with us.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some notes:
> 
> Dan guy: a plot-advancing OC. Likely actually called Danh, but Richie being Richie would've just turned that into Dan guy.  
> Poem is taken from Chu Văn An (1292-1370) from his poem Spring Morning. The translation was in the following article. 
> 
> http://www.electrummagazine.com/2014/07/van-mieu-the-temple-of-literature-in-hanoi-vietnam/
> 
> Unfortunately I can only find one potential source for it - possibly a translation by Martin Wasserman. But I can't find a copy of it anywhere, so I'm unfortunately SOL.
> 
> Other things worth knowing/looking up if you think it'll clarify anything: 
> 
> The Holy Mountain (1973) film by Alejandro Jodorowsky  
> which in turn was influenced in part by the book Mount Analogue (1952) by René Daumal
> 
> The Doors of Perception (1953) by Aldous Huxley, about his experiences on mescaline.
> 
> Also the I Ching and it's influence on modern-era counterculturalism.
> 
> ALSO: is Jung pro-Nazi? There's an academic question it seems like no one can agree upon. He swore up down and sideways he wasn't, but then he also did write about the 'Aryan collective unconsciousness being superior to the Jewish collective unconsciousness' or some such bullshit, so take that for what you will. As for why a random racist biker would be talking about Jungian synchronicity to begin with... well, if you look at your average conspiracy theory wingnut these days, they always seem to do a lot of reading. Not of anything factually sound, but of stuff that buttresses their ideology? They often find the time.
> 
> Also I'm sorry Bev's dating an abusive biker but don't worry, it won't last. Bev will not be stuck with him forever.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you want to listen along:
> 
> White Rabbit - Jefferson Airplane (1967)  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WANNqr-vcx0
> 
> If you think about it, 'White Rabbit' would be the quintessential Eddie song, if Eddie was taking fucktons of drugs. (Is it too on the nose to reference that song in a story this psychedelic? Welp, I did, too late to change it now.)
> 
> Other random things of note: I now know exactly where this fic is going. There are some new tags accordingly. The Holy Mountain keeps getting more important to this. But that said, I don't think you'll need to have seen it/it won't affect your ability to enjoy this fic. But if anyone reading this happens to be a fan... well, I'll be curious to know what you'll think of the way this plays out.
> 
> Also: trigger warning for the f-slur, and for some internalized homophobia on Eddie's part.

* * *

_Every day's another dawning_  
_Give the morning winds a chance_  
_Always catch your thunder yawning_  
_Lift your mind into the dance_  
_Sweep the shadows from your awning_  
_Shrink the fourfold circumstance_  
_That lies outside this house don't pass it by._

\- "Slip Inside This House" - 13th Floor Elevators

* * *

Eddie doesn’t drink much, as a rule. It’s a self-imposed rule, at that. For all her restrictions, Sonia Kaspbrack doesn’t forbid her son from the bottle outright. She has never had cause to. Eddie is temperance incarnate, at least as far as she knows. He has no ideological justification for this. It’s just that he’s always has this niggling feeling in the back of his brain that he needs to be on high alert for… something. He can never relax, never lose himself, because whatever it is that the dread is attached to, whatever it is his subconscious seems to think is doomed to happen, he knows it’ll strike when his guard is down.

This night, though, the night after Richie tells him about the mountain and about the wolf, Eddie has a glass of wine with dinner. He’d rather it have been white but red is all they have. Red is an unsafe colour, he’s decided – it’s too close to blood, and the thought of it turns his stomach, but there’s nothing else in the house to drink and he needs to drink to make the nonsensical make sense.

As his mother talks at him in a homily of Nixon-this and Commies-that, Eddie feels transubstantiated. He’s becoming something else – someone who doesn’t listen, doesn’t hang on his mother’s words in the awe-fear of a supplicant. He drinks the wine of his self-made sacrament and lets the lamb on his dinner plate grow cold, untouched.

“You’re injured – you’ve not been the same since you hurt your lip.”

“I’m going for a walk.”

Sonia looks at him like he’s Lazarus and he’s just walked in as though he’s not been dead for the past four days.

“Why, what for?”

He ignores her, rising as though beamed up from the earth, a cow caught in a tractor beam.

“Eddie – what’s gotten into you? Where are you going?”

“Sometimes there are no answers,” he offers, “or the answers that are, are too big. I’ll be home later – don’t wait up for me.”

He grabs his coat and walks away to a chorus of her screaming. His senses are dampened and the wine sloshes unpleasantly in his gut. He makes it to the property line before he has to duck into a bush and vomit on the ground. The stomach acid stings his still tender lip, and he shudders at the taste. He shudders again when he spots it. There, in the dirt, is a men’s watch – tarnished, muddy, but otherwise, seemingly undamaged.

_Don’t touch it, Eddie. Don’t pick it up._

That voice isn’t his own – at least, not that of Eddie Kaspbrak the somewhat functional young man of twenty-five – no, it’s that echo-voice, the instinct whisperer, the thing that’s been in each and every hominid since before they even left the trees – before they even stood tall on two legs. It’s the thing that tells a prey animal when to stand stalk still, and when to bolt. Eddie feels eyes on him, the weight of some unknown, unseen presence as he lifts the watch from the earth with shaking hands. He turns it over and his blood runs glacial.

_Zodiac: Sea W̴̡̢̫̤̝̖͍̳̖̱̖͖̱͆̓̀͜ͅͅǫ̶̛̈̽̋l̶̰̺̱̪̻̻̓f̶̢̳̰͚̓  
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Eddie throws the thing as far away from himself as he can, flinching as if burned, and breaks into a run, tearing down the street in the direction of the hotel where he knows Richie is staying. He gets farther than he’d thought he could before his chest goes tight and he collapses, wheezing, against a newspaper box. He digs through his coat pockets and takes a pull on his inhaler, eyes darting over his shoulder as though he expects to see that damned two-mouthed freak of a wolf come strolling around the corner, mouth dripping blood. There’s nothing of course – of _course,_ nothing. Eddie sobs soundlessly and shuts his eyes, taking a steadying breath.

“It’s Richie getting to you – that’s all it is. He’s making you crazy – all of this is making you crazy!”

When he opens his eyes, the world is unchanged. The sky has not fallen.

“You found some lost watch and almost cracked – get a grip, Eddie,” he tells himself, but he still jog-walks all the way to the hotel. When he’s a block away, he finds a payphone and calls ahead, having to look the number up in the phone book, his mind is in such shambles. Having to flip through the stained pages makes him cringe – he’s almost certain someone’s pissed on them at some point – but the most important thing is getting the call connected through the hotel receptionist and being able to hear –

“Yello? Richie Tozier spea-”

“Richie, it’s Eddie, I’m outside, can you come down?”

It comes out all at once on the tail end of a single wheeze. Richie swears and then the phone falls – outside its cradle – and Eddie can faintly hear him throwing his clothes and shoes on and slamming the door. He listens to the ambient sounds of the room, biting his scabbed lip ragged, until the main doors open and Richie comes racing out of the lobby like a bat out of hell.

Too frantic to care what it looks like, Eddie runs to his old friend and curls around him like a frightened dog, whimpering and burying his face in his shoulder as he tries and fails to explain the watch and the wine and the way he feels like he’s no longer the same Eddie Kaspbrak who woke up that morning.

“Hey, hey – easy, there, kid, you’re going to suffocate yourself,” Richie says, worry all on his face, in his eyes. “Why don’t you come on up with me?”

Eddie nods and follows, gaining enough self-awareness and control to step away, that they might walk in as two friends, and nothing more in the eyes of the small-minded hotel staff. That’s the last thing either of them need – harassment on the basis of something so ephemeral as whether their temporary flesh prisons are planning to fuck or not. Derry’s not a kind town to deviation of any kind and Eddie doesn’t think he, personally, could weather one more lick of cruelty – not now.

“I don’t have much in,” Richie apologizes, ushering Eddie into the hotel room and locking the door. The sound of the lock clicking is the sweetest that Eddie’s ever heard, and he nearly weeps with relief.

“I’ve got corn nuts and shit coffee, or shittier beer. Or we can order something –”

“No – no. Please.”

Richie nods.

“Yeah, you got it. Uh… I take it the shit’s hit the fan, then, huh?”

Eddie laughs through tears.

“You could say that, yeah. Oh, God, do you have a handkerchief or a – a napkin or something?”

Richie shakes his head, but ducks into the adjoining bathroom to snag a handful of toilet paper. Eddie takes it from him and gratefully blows his nose.

“You look like you ran here,” Richie jokes but he stops laughing when he sees Eddie nod. “Jesus Christ, Eds, you could’ve killed yourself.”

“I don’t – I mean – it’s a placebo, Richie.”

“Yeah, but name a time in the last five years you’ve actually run for your life. I’ll wait.”

Eddie nods. He is out of shape – made frail by his mother’s and his own choices – it often embarrasses him, but today it makes him feel like a sitting duck and he hates it. Numbly, he takes a handful of corn nuts when Richie offers them, only realizing after sucking the salt off the first two that he’s transferred them from his palm to his mouth without first washing his hands. The ambiguous filth of the public phone book makes his skin crawl, but he fights it down and puts a third in his mouth. At this point, he is almost certainly as good as dead. Whatever evil’s Richie has been stirring up have an eye on them both now. Potential food poisoning pales in comparison.

“I… sensed it, Richie. The wolf. I saw – this stupid _watch_ and I just –”

And then it all flows out of him in bits and piece. He cries a little. He accepts a tepid, piss-water beer even though he really shouldn’t, not on an empty stomach, not after throwing up. About thirty minutes into his breakdown, Richie shyly offers him a little, hand-rolled cigarette but no – no, of course it’s not a cigarette, not a proper, real, all-American cigarette. Eddie shakes his head, then changes his mind and snatches up the joint before Richie can hide it away again.

“Just – take it easy when you breathe it in – takes the edge off,” Richie whispers, and his hands are shaking too.

As it turns out, trying to smoke a joint mostly just gives Eddie a coughing fit, and any buzz he gets is, he thinks, second hand from sitting next to Richie as he finishes smoking it alone. At some point, Richie migrated over, and now they’re both hip to hip, thigh to thigh on the bed, both facing the window with its curtains drawn tight shut, both too scared to crack them even a little bit. Richie is a furnace and Eddie – Eddie wants to be close to that heat. It feels like it’s been a lifetime since he was last around someone he felt safe enough to let touch him.

_What are you so afraid of?_

And shit, that's a question that’s almost crippled by the sheer number of applicable answers. Eddie is afraid of so much. He always has been, all his life – hell, just sitting here next to Richie on a bed with their thighs touching is something he’s been running from since the first stirrings of puberty, but now those old fears seem… quaint. Provincial even. What does it matter if you’re a faggot or not if the Devil himself is after you?

As if to punctuate this pointed realization, a couple in the next room, or perhaps across the hall, makes themselves known, the woman moaning high and shrill with the theatricality of someone almost certainly expecting to fake her orgasm.

“Ohyeahyeahyeahyeah –”

There’s a violence to it – a repetitiveness to her moans, timed, Eddie is sure, to the thrusts pistoning in and out of her, that should feel sensual but doesn’t. It feels like a war crime, like a knife stabbing into a chest over and over, the dull _thwuckthwuckthwuck_ of a blade catching itself on a rib but powering on, a battering ram into a chest cavity.

“Least somebody’s having fun tonight,” Richie laughs, and the levity helps, it really does, it gives Eddie something to cling to to stop him from falling any further down.

“I feel like Alice,” he says before he can think not to.

“Alice…?”

“ 'Alice in Wonderland' Alice. You come here and – and pitch me into the rabbit hole. There’s no getting out again. Alice wakes up and it’s all a dream, but somehow I know, as much of a nightmare as this is, that I’m not dreaming, am I?”

Richie looks at him strangely.

“Are you a Jefferson Airplane fan, by any chance?”

“No… why?”

“Forget it – look Eds… this is the hand we’ve been dealt and… it’s shit, man, there’s no two ways about it.”

Eddie says nothing – there’s nothing _to_ say – and takes a miserable swig of his lukewarm beer.

“So… what do you wanna do?”

Richie’s not a leader – not comfortably – and it shows. Eddie shuts his eyes and sighs, wishing for certainty. There is none, but he wishes all the same.

“I guess… I guess I’ve got to try.”

He opens his eyes and sees the confusion plain on Richie’s face.

“You want to open doors, White Rabbit, you go ahead. I’ll follow.”

The smile that earns him makes Eddie want to lean in for a taste of it. He doesn’t, but the pull low in his belly and the sound of the fucking next door make him feel like he’s on the threshold of something momentous, carnal, and dangerous. Richie slings an arm around his shoulders and ruffles his hair and he lets himself ride the wave of sensation – five tiny points of contact rubbing circles like holy sigils, protective runes marked on his scalp.

* * *

_One pill makes you larger_  
_And one pill makes you small,_  
_And the ones that mother gives you_  
_Don't do anything at all._

_-_ "White Rabbit" - Jefferson Airplane

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Zodiac Sea Wolf watches are a real thing, and were back in the 70s too, for anyone who isn't a big watch guy. According to the gods of Google, they're 'dive watches' whatever the fuck that means.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you want to listen along:
> 
> Sanc-Divided - Fraction (1971)  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7slukfIlGU
> 
> I think it goes without saying by now - the Pennywise tabs are definitely some kind of fucked up bad magic type shit, not regular LSD. Not to say you can't have some pretty wild and fucked up times ON LSD, but I don't want people reading this thinking this is actually going to be what a normal or even a normal-bad trip is, necessarily.
> 
> I will add some additional notes here and in the endnotes for the chapter as needed. One thing I will also say is please, for the love of all that is holy, do not look to Richie Tozier for trip sitting etiquette. This is not the way you do this. Do not look to either of these men and say 'hey, that's how I'm gonna take my next dose.' Please. I don't want that on my conscience, lol.
> 
> (In that same vein, please don't drink and drive after reading this either. As for mixing your drugs or handling acid tabs without tweezers/gloves, that's up to you to figure out as everyone has their own theories and thinks they're right.)
> 
> I will also say that the next chapter will be where the shit really starts hitting the proverbial fan. That's also where I'm gonna start really pulling from my own bad trip experiences, but dial it up to eleven. There will be trigger warnings and you should be able to skip that chapter without missing much if it's a kind of heavy you don't want to fuck with.

* * *

_Thinking of the sanc-divided_  
_Thoughts I have today_  
_Wondering when the Spirit moves me_  
_If I will obey_  
  
_I can hear the death surrounding_  
_All of his prey_  
_Are my thoughts for real_  
_Must I live in what I feel_

\- "Sanc-Divided" - Fraction

* * *

They drive deep into the woods – deeper than they ever dared venture as children – and the silence that sits between them in the bus is charged with something electric and uncanny. Eddie stares out the window and watches tree trunk sentinels pass in uneven rows and wonders why this feels so familiar and so alien all at once. Uncomfortable with the quiet, and oblivious to its sacred mysteries, Richie talks and talks, shattering the peace, but his voice is a claxon that Eddie clings to as they venture deeper into the abyss.

“I never had a trip like that before, not ever, man it was… it was like I wasn’t alone in there, dig? Like my head was… _ocupado,_ you know? And not like it is with voices or impressions. It was like there was something _there._ I don’t know if it was the wolf or what, but it was circling around, weaving in and out of my thoughts, and if I tried to pin it down, it’d slip away. The longer it was in there with me, the more I realized that I knew it – that it knew me – that we’d met somewhere before a long time ago. You remember too, don’t you? Just in flashes and snippets, but it’s there. Something happened to us, Eds, to all of us – something real bad. I don’t know if it was the FBI, the Commies, or little green men from Mars, but something got in behind our eyes and detonated an H bomb in each of our skulls, and this whole time since we’ve been living like we’re dead and just didn’t know it.”

The reality of the absurd, unreal situation should be terrifying. Eddie supposes that, on some level, it is – it’s worse, maybe, than anything he’s ever felt. Still, he is filled with a foreign sensation, a resolve he does not understand. It has come from without – come, perhaps, from the collective unconscious of this town, or of his friends, or of all of humanity. Hands tight on the wheel, Richie continues to speak.

“It just kept circling. It wouldn’t _stop._ My mind was just… thrashing, like a rat on a glue trap. I felt pieces of myself just… dislocate. Fall off. I was pulling myself limb from limb, just to get out of there. None of the usual stuff helped – I couldn’t navigate, I couldn’t keep it away from me. It. It… wanted me right where I was, running myself ragged.”

Without taking his eyes off the road, Richie stuck his hand out.

“Glove box. Not the handgun.”

Eddie finds the flask and doesn’t think to condemn it. There’s no need of restraint where they’re going. Might as well drive drunk into the mouth of the whale, the belly of the beast. Richie takes a swig and hands it back. Eddie smells it – bourbon? It’s hard, anyway. He balks at taking a sip himself. The thought of putting his lips over the place Richie’s have just been is too much for him in the moment, rattled and heightened as he’s feeling.

“You’re just gonna have to ride it out,” Richie continues. “There’s no way around it. You’re gonna have to let it take you where it needs to. But I’ll be there with you – I promise.”

It’s terrifying, ritualistic, like offering himself up to be sacrificed to some terrible horror he can’t yet perceive. Eddie hugs himself tightly in the passenger seat, grimacing. His earlier burst of courage has evaporated as though it were never there.

“This feels like the lead up to an execution.”

Richie looks over at that, brow furrowed.

“I’m scared, Richie. I’m… God… so scared right now. How do we know this’ll work – how do we know –”

“We don’t really know anything for sure, but… I feel like this’ll help. It _has_ to help. There’s power in this stuff.”

“Is it powerful enough to protect me against whatever… ‘it’ is – the thing we’re up against?”

Richie swallows hard, putting the bus in park. It shudders to a stop and the sudden quiet, without the rumble of an engine in the background, is repulsive for reasons neither man can explain.

“I promise I won’t let it kill you,” Richie swears. “But it’ll… it’ll probably come close.”

Eddie shakes his head in disbelief. How is he doing this? How is _he_ doing this – taking drugs in a bus in the middle of the night? Eddie, who’s always been a good boy, a law-abiding person – Eddie who, until yesterday, had never so much as smoked grass?

He watches in passive unease as Richie produces the tinfoil and unfolds it. The blotter art clowns grin hideously up at Eddie, a repeating pattern of ugly red-ringed mouths too full of teeth.

“When I bought these,” Richie exposits, “there were enough for all of us. You, me – all seven of us. It came like that, an uneven number.”

Eddie counts the squares in front of him.

“There’s only five here.”

“Bill and Mike already took them.”

Eddie is completely caught off guard by this.

“Were they… okay? Afterwards?”

Richie gives a weird, reactive full-body twitch in response, shifting in his seat nervously.

“Okay’s a relative thing, Spaghetti man. Bill seemed to get… more cerebral, if that’s even possible. Mike… Mike said it ‘made things make sense.’ War things, more than childhood things. Said that after he found out about My Lai, it changed him – made it so he couldn’t see anything salvageable in all his time in the service, even though he’d had nothing to do with it. I told him it was pointless, feeling guilty over something like that, but he wouldn’t hear of it. ‘Might as well have been me,’ he said. ‘Blood was on our whole nation’s hands.’ After he was discharged he was in a real bad place, he said – said he spent a lot of time just reading about everything he could. He said he was ‘fixated on war crimes’ – that’s how he put it. When Bill took his dose, he cried a lot – kept calling for his brother, but when Mike did, he just sat there, like he was off in some other world. He just sat, stalk still, for three whole days. Didn’t eat, or drink, or shit – I’ve never seen anything like it- it was like he was frozen solid. Normal LSD wouldn’t… anyway. I came and went - I still had to do all those things - but I stayed close. Three days. Then he just blinked all of a sudden, looked me dead in the eye and said ‘that’s it, then.’ And I said, ‘what’s it?’ And he just shook his head a little and said ‘the blood’s on more than soldier’s hands, Rich.’ I mean, I don’t know what the hell that’s supposed to mean, but he seemed… comforted’s the wrong word. He seemed resigned to it.”

A pause. Eddie waits for the night to break its own silence – a cricket, an owl, _anything,_ but it’s as though they’re in a bubble. Not a sound. Not even the leaves rustling in the evening breeze.

_Something is wrong. Something is so, so wrong._

“Tell me about yours again,” Eddie blurts out. “What you saw – Richie – please, I… I need to know.”

“I already told you. The wolf. The little detour to Las Vegas I can’t explain.”

“But how could you _stand_ it? Did you think it would kill you?”

_Did you want **It** to kill you?_

Richie looks away, blinking rapidly in quick succession. He takes a minute to speak again.

“It’s not going to make you feel any better – me answering that.”

Well, shit. Eddie swallows hard. He watches as Richie separates one square from the sheet – one tiny little leering clown face – and places it in his palm.

“Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil,” he murmurs. He’s not sure why – he doesn’t consider himself a particularly religious man. Still, there’s something… hallowed, sacrosanct in this ritual he’s about to submit to – and it _does_ feel like a ritual. He chuckles involuntarily, then, a nervous laugh.

“What?” Richie looks on with interest.

“Nothing. Just… it’s funny. Not funny ha-ha. Funny like… we see it as perfectly reasonable for people who want to to take communion. The Body of Christ – all that holy… holiness condensed down into a wafer. Cannibalism by proxy. But what this is – what I’m about to do – makes me a… a dirty hippie, a commie, an enemy of the state… whatever, take your pick.”

What he’s not saying is telegraphed in the gaps between his words. _This feels important. This feels sacred. This feels evil. This feels like sin. This feels like something cosmic. I've never been so metaphysically vulnerable in my life and I'm completely fucking terrified I won't be myself anymore afterwards.  
_

Richie whistles.

“Ease up, there, Eds – jokes are supposed to make you feel better, not crush your soul under a car tire.”

“I said ‘not funny ha-ha.’ I did say that.”

“Mm, well, maybe just leave them to me. You’re just stalling, now, anyway.”

“Yeah. But it’s… fucked, isn’t it? _We’re_ fucked. Mike’s not wrong about that.”

Richie cracks a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes.

“You know that even if you say that now, you’re still gonna have to take the tab, right?”

Eddie sighs. That damned clown’s little red ink eyes bore into his, mocking, cruel.

“If I’m doing this,” he breathes, “if I’m really doing this, then I want to be brave about it.”

“You _are_ brave –” Richie begins, but is cut off when Eddie leans across the divide between the seats and grabs hold of the back of his neck.

“Shut up, Tozier,” he hisses, and then his mouth is the center of Richie’s universe, the closed line of his lips pressing hard and desperate against Richie’s own startled, slightly open mouth. As quick as it comes, the kiss is over – Eddie pulls back with his eyes shut tight and sticks that nasty little clown head on his tongue. Richie’s too startled to stop him, to say anything – and really, what good would it do? He _does_ have to take it. Richie’s not sure why, but he knows it’s true the same way he knew he had to come back here.

“When does it start?” Eddie whispers, his eyes still closed, his fists balled up against his thighs. His back goes rigid then, his eyes widening open until they’re flared huge, white all around his irises.

 _This shit is definitely not acid,_ Richie thinks despairingly, futilely. The rabbit hole is widening around them, swallowing them both, and there is no salvation here, no gods to guide them. Richie’s been through it three times now and watching from the sidelines is worse than going through it, somehow. He grabs his discarded flask and drains it in one, chugging through the grating burn of cheap liquor. He bites his lip, and that’s when he remembers, frantically, fleetingly, that Eddie kissed him. _Eddie._ And it’s so incongruous – so unexpected – that he glues himself consciously to that thought like a ward, like a talisman, even as the terror rises in him, threatens to swallow him up. Eddie – not the Eddie who kissed him, but this new, vacant-eyed husk of Eddie – slumps forward and sideways, forehead resting on the passenger-side door, and whimpers softly. Anxious, Richie lights a cigarette, draws his knees up to his chest, turning sideways, the soles of his shoes tracking dirt on the driver’s seat, and settles in to watch the bad times come.

* * *

_If your limbs begin dissolving_  
_In the water that you tread_  
_All surroundings are evolving_  
_In the stream that clears your head_  
_Find yourself a caravan_  
_Like Noah must have led_  
_And slip inside this house as you pass by._

\- "Slip Inside This House" - 13th Floor Elevators

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> While I was listening to albums on Youtube with autoplay, this Fraction album, Moon Blood, from 1971 came to my attention. It's actually a Christian psychedelic rock album - first one of those I've ever encountered in the wild and it's absolutely as nuts as that sounds. I don't vibe with most of the songs, but seeing how psychedelic visions of trippy horror could easily turn into psychedelic visions of trippy demons and Satan and stuff makes sense, and it fit the vibe I was going for here, so I rolled with it.
> 
> Also, I feel like if Mike HAD been drafted, he would've been the kind of person whose war experience, combined with the realities of the conflict (e.g. massacres and war crimes he would have heard about and had time to research after he came back home) pushed him towards philosophy in a big way. Him being such a research-oriented person, I can see him going off down a rabbit hole of his own about that.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you want to listen along:
> 
> Schizofrenia - A Touch of Sunshine (1969)  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7r_ELjeqdE
> 
> Decided to break this chapter up into two parts or else it'd be too long. So the shit hasn't hit the fan as quick as I thought it would. But it will in the next chapter so the previous warnings still apply, albeit in a deferred manner.
> 
> Other things:
> 
> (Edit: this changed - I did tag them because they became important. As for the trigger warnings though they're still fairly spotty and it is what it is) I'm not officially tagging the other pairings in this because they aren't parings in the romantic sense, and even really as hook-ups. It's more... 'spiritually-motivated sexual expression'. I am trying to keep this fic challenging, thematically, in the way that good psychedelic art often is - it's surprising, sometimes hard to take. But I also want to be understanding of peoples traumas and treat the reader with care, so with that said, my attempt at balance is as follows. Be aware that Richie does have a threesome in a flashback. I won't give more than that away, but it's all good, consensual, wholesome sex, and way less challenging to take in than the group sex in the actual book It since in this case, everyone's like a 25 year old hippie.
> 
> Also by this point, I've had it be that Richie's got one divorce under his belt simply because I don't think he could fit more marriages in feasibly by 25. Maybe 2 - maybe, but that'd still be a stretch. So one it is.

* * *

_Soft touches of sunshine_  
_Melt into the snow_  
_The one that loves me_  
_Oh, I don’t know_  
_I’ve had to run_  
_To stay alive_  
_But still I’m searching_  
_For a place to hide_  
_Someday you’ll come and you will stay_  
_Yes, it’ll always be that way_  
_Always, forever_

\- "A Touch of Sunshine" - Schizofrenia

* * *

IN THE MONTHS BEFORE THE RETURN TO DERRY

* * *

When Bill had partaken, he had been ready, in as much as any man could be. Kneeling in the dirt, clean mountain air filling his lungs, he had shut his eyes and left his body behind.

The first few hours after the acid kicked in had been peaceful, if a little strange. He had gotten up, walked over to a boulder. and sat down with his back to it. He had – calmly – asked Richie to bring him a travel typewriter stored in his tent. Bemused, Richie had done so, not particularly surprised that Bill wanted to write, but not expecting anything much to come of it. In Richie’s own experience, whenever he was high – no matter what he was high on – the last thing he wanted to do was work. Even when he dabbled with stimulants he was never productive – just antsy. Bill, though, just loaded a sheet of paper into the typewriter, hunched over, and started typing.

No big deal – Richie had grabbed himself a beer from the portable cooler by the tent. Audra had come out to bring them some blankets – it could get cold at night – and to throw more wood on the campfire. She looked at Bill fondly, and there was something in that – something special that Richie felt he wasn’t supposed to see – so much love on that open face. It filled his chest up with something that hurt but wasn’t strictly sad. He rubbed his ring finger absently and thought of pitching his wedding ring down a storm drain in anger after his wife walked out – just another failed relationship in a long, long line of personal disasters.

“Bill,” Audra had said, then, concerned. “Richie – Bill’s eyes. He’s typing with his eyes closed.”

Richie had been a little alarmed by that, but then, Bill was always writing. It was conceivable he could remember the keys by touch. It was also conceivable he was just typing gibberish, but somehow, Richie was certain he wasn’t, despite being nowhere near close enough to see the page.

When Bill reached the end of the page, he folded it into a tiny square with slow, deliberate movements, and then pitched it into the fire. He stood then, taking the typewriter with him, and walked to the edge of the blaze.

“Watch him,” Richie warned, but Audra was on it – an old hand at this. She took a step forwards, reaching out, and touched his shoulder.

For a moment, Bill stood still. She shook him slightly.

“Bill? Come away from the fire.”

He said something, then, and it took Richie a moment to realize he was speaking backwards. Then he screamed, and threw the typewriter, and himself, into the flames.

It was instinct at that point – Richie tackled Bill hard, knocking him into the ground, away from the fire, before it could touch him. Audra was screaming and Bill was screaming, and Richie scrabbled like an animal in the dirt until he was able to drag Bill away. It was then that he started to understand – the person who had sold him these tabs – the person whose face, try as he might, he could not remember – was no friend, not even close, and this – this wasn’t your garden variety acid. This was something else. Something… evil.

Audra seemed to sense it too, and in a moment of futile panic, she attempted to force him to throw up by sticking her fingers in his throat.

“That’s not gonna do shit,” Richie insisted, and gripped her little wrist hard enough to bruise. “He’s gotta face it, Audra – he’s gotta beat it. He’s on his own.”

She calmed some, enough that she could see sense, and the two of them carried Bill into the tent, leaving the typewriter to melt on its pyre. For two days, Bill lay motionless in a sleeping bag, but for his eyes twitching fast behind his lids. On three occasions, he started calling out for Georgie, poor dead Georgie, who, somehow, Richie had forgotten until he heard the bleating note of pain tear out of Bill’s raw throat. One of these times, Bill attempted to rise from the bed – the only real movement he’d attempted to make in hours. He grasped at the air as if reaching for something, then burst into mournful sobs.

Audra was scared and uncertain. Richie was scared and uncertain, too. The pair of them alternated between wiping Bill’s sweaty face down with a wash cloth and brewing herbal tea to keep themselves going. Just when they were close to giving up – when Audra’d convinced Richie to go back to the commune’s main campsite and ask for assistance – Bill had opened his eyes. Upon seeing his wife’s face, he slung his arms around her, fell across her lap, and started weeping and kissing her hands like they could bless him.

Richie hadn’t been sure what to do, then. He was reminded of the look on Audra’s face when she hadn’t noticed he was there – the private, perfect love he didn’t dare intrude on, not with his history. He’d gone to where the fire was guttering and stared at the mangled remains of Bill’s typewriter as the acrid smoke plumes of burning plastic stung his eyes. When Bill came up behind him, he jumped like he’d been given an electric shock.

Bill hadn’t been angry. Not even close – Bill had pressed their foreheads together and laughed and rubbed noses and pressed kisses to Richie’s moustache and he couldn’t have stopped him if he wanted to.

“I’m so sorry, Bill,” he babbled helplessly, “I don’t know what was in that stuff – I didn’t mean to –”

“Richie, Richie, it’s okay – it’s better than okay! For the first time, all the closed doorways - they’re wide open! Oh – but you – you need to get these to the others.”

“The… the others?”

Bill nodded forcefully, his grip tight on Richie's forearms.

“Our gang – the lucky seven, from that summer. You remember? Of course, you remember, Richie. Why else would you have come here in the first place?”

Emotions were a tangled mess. Richie hadn’t slept properly since Bill went under, and to have his self-admonishment, no, his self- _hatred_ interrupted by the realization that he hadn’t killed his friend or made him permanently crazy, was like liquid fire in his blood. Euphoria made him giddy, inappropriate – but he’d always been prone to that, anyway, unable to separate kindness from something more than kindness, so hungry – so goddamned _hungry_ for anything that’d plug up the hole in his heart where all his hope kept running through. He stopped dodging Bill’s beatific kisses and let Bill turn them into something else.

Audra emerged from the tent in nothing but a silk kimono, untied, her bare breasts and the fur of her bush burning themselves into Richie’s mind forever.

“Good boys,” she cooed warmly. “Come to the tent. It is safe now. Let us be at peace.”

The tent was hazy inside, a warm cave, a womb, the smell of Bill’s stale fear sweat driven out by incense, patchouli, overriding but never quite masking the funk of good grass and something else that Richie found just as safe, as comforting – the arousal of a woman. When Audra turned her head demurely, baring her neck, Richie looked wordlessly to Bill, and his old friend nodded, lips still kiss-swollen and wet. Richie attached himself to Audra’s throat like a leech, and then it was all a blur, a mess of limbs, great plains of skin, tuft-thickets of hair, the warm cave between Audra’s tanned, slender legs, and a chorus of voices, Audra’s begging, keening, as Richie made love to her, the taboo of it – fucking another man’s wife, his _friend’s_ wife – made him leak like a faucet, made his cock stand rock-solid and red against the auburn trail on his belly when she writhed so hard she slipped off of him. Bill was in his ear, louder than Richie’d expected him to be, but somehow still quiet – close – lips against his hairline and the back of his neck. Unfamiliar heat – another man’s penis resting against the small of Richie’s back and rutting against the crack of his ass, simulating an act he’d never known himself to want, before. Audra offered her hands, palms up, to her husband, and Bill clasped them tight, and Richie was encased in love, in intimacy, not stolen, not borrowed, not loaned – but _given,_ freely and without expectations. He wasn’t sure if he’s the first one, or the only one, to cry, but he was the loudest, so Audra reached for the ashtray in the corner, took a long drag from a forgotten, still smouldering joint, and sealed her mouth over his, sharing even this.

Afterwards, when they were all fucked out and tired, Richie couldn’t stop smiling, giggling, laughing at little things that Bill and Audra said to him and to each other. It wasn’t just the grass that’d got him giddy, either – it was the love. Their little three-person tent was safe, protected, the nylon walls somehow strong enough, impenetrable enough, to keep all manner of wolves from the door – even the worst one.

“You’ve got to do something for me, Richie,” Bill said against his cheek, breath tickling Richie’s left eye and making him wink involuntarily.

“Whatever you need, Bill.”

“You’ve got to track the others down and get them to remember. When all that is done – you’ve got to come back here, to me, with them.”

“How’s that gonna work? I can’t imagine they’ll all want to go – and anyway, they won’t all be the kind of people who’ll take acid, even if I do shop up with it. There’s just no way we’d all have gone that route. Not Ben – not _Stan._ ”

He’d gotten used to it, by then – the fact that these names which once held next to no meaning at all were now more precious to him than those of his ex-wife, or the guys from work, or anyone else in his whole life.

“You’ve got to try. Please, Richie. Georgie told me – and I know it mustn’t have been Georgie, couldn’t have been – but he found me in the underground, the black void of the grave – and he led me out – took my hand like this –” Bill takes Richie’s hand to demonstrate. “He said, ‘bring them here to the mountain, and avenge me.’ I think we can, Richie. I think, when we have all begun to remember, we can trap the beast within our minds and kill it.”

It was hard for Richie to think of a reply to that – even he could be at a lost for words sometimes, and the overwhelming sense of _rightness_ was axis-shifting, skewing the world’s orbit, and it muted him. He _did_ have to find the others, he _did_ have to round them up, and not because Bill asked him to (though he’d have done it for Bill regardless,) but because Bill was right, and dream-Georgie was right too – there had to be a way to transcend the evil, to shake it off and move on and heal and be something new, reborn, on shaky, fawn legs, stumbling wet and dripping from the birthing sack. Audra was dropping kisses, feather-light, against his shoulder, and Bill was staring off into a nowhere place, wherever it was he went when his mind was wandering, and Richie felt a kind of peace he’d never felt before, and knew he’d crawl over glass and barbed wire, set himself on fire, eat a handful of nails, or worse, to feel again.

* * *

_Four and twenty birds of Maya_  
_Baked into an atom you_  
_Polarized into existence_  
_Magnet heart from red to blue_  
_To such extent the realm of dark_  
_Within the picture it seems true_  
_But slip inside this house and then decide._

\- "Slip Inside This House" - 13th Floor Elevators

* * *

Richie was sure that whatever guided him, good or evil, would get him to his friends. He trusted his gut, trusted impulse, completely giving himself over to the will of the road. He found Mike in a bookstore, miles from anywhere that meant anything to either of them. He’d felt called too, Mike admitted later, and not just to browse racks of books of Eastern philosophy. He’d been searching for a path out of his own private hell since his feet touched back down on U.S. soil. Richie appearing, expectedly unexpected, with his tinfoil wrapped curse-prize, was just the thing Mike had been needing. He’d needed no more convincing than that.

Mike had taken Richie back to a tiny one-room apartment he’d been renting. He had told Richie to help himself to whatever he wanted from the fridge, and to feel free to browse his books – then had sat down on the floor, taken his tab, and gone still.

Richie hadn’t been sure what to do when, after ten hours, Mike still hadn’t so much as moved. He was still breathing but beyond that, nothing. By this point, Richie was beginning to accept that whatever was on the blotter paper wasn’t normal acid - Bill talking backwards had seen to that - so he decided that, so long as Mike kept breathing, he wouldn’t worry about it. The last thing either of them needed was to go to the hospital and then potentially have the cops get involved.

Richie didn’t want to stray too far in case Mike _did_ suddenly start doing something like try to jump out a window, so he just wandered the little apartment, opening cabinets and drawers, being nosy for want of anything else to do. Mike didn’t own a lot of furniture – the whole apartment was pretty bare, pretty minimalist. Beyond a mattress on the floor and a chest of drawers, all the rest of the space that was taken up was taken up with books. As Richie was riffling through one shelf, he found something else – photo albums. There were two of them, and he opened one at random. The first, he realized immediately, contained evidence of Mike’s time in Vietnam – his service medal, letters from his mother, a professional portrait he’d had taken of himself in uniform looking incredibly young. Other photos, clearly taken by Mike himself. Barracks, fields, little guard stations. Three shirtless black GIs sitting around a record player and pulling faces for the camera, flipping Mike off good-naturedly. Other snaps capturing the general vibe of the life of a soldier. Officially, things were pretty mixed, but from Mike’s snaps it was clear that de facto segregation was still heavily in play – there were only a few white guys, and one guy who, if Richie had to guess, might’ve been Native American – who appeared semi-regularly in the photos.

Somewhere along the way, the photos changed. There were less carefree shots of guys shaving or ogling nude magazines or goofing around. There were more… artsy shots, Richie supposed you might call them. Boots lined up neat, freshly polished. Rain dripping down from the lip of a roof. The occasional local animal – a frog or a bug. Then one photo, which stopped Richie cold. It was a photo of Mike – taken by himself in a mirror. His eyes were dull – his face serious – his mouth a tight, thin line. He had no shirt on, dog tag bright against his chest, and the shiny metal struck Richie as, suddenly, sickeningly macabre. _You know what dog tags are for, don’t you, Tozier? One round the neck, half of one in each boot. For the inevitability that you’re otherwise unidentifiable. Sure maybe you’re unconscious or you’re just out of your mind, but the ones in the shoes? That shit’s for corpses._

Richie noticed, then, the caption, handwritten in faint, faded pencil. Mike’s handwriting - it was unmistakable.

_I AM A DEAD MAN WALKING_

He closed the album and put it back. He didn’t feel right, digging any deeper. That stuff wasn’t his to see. Turning his attention to the other album, hoping for something – anything – lighter, he was surprised, upon opening it at random, to be faced with a picture of _himself_ , all of twelve years old – hair like the end of a matchstick, glasses with tape on ‘em – the whole works. Dork city.

They were all in there, too – the whole gang. That’s what the photo album was – their childhood, documented with loving care by Mike who, Richie remembered suddenly, always had been into photographs. Him and his old man.

That album kept Richie busy for a long time. Some of pages had things on them that weren’t photographs – old illustrations, newspaper clippings. One drawing in particular of that goddamned clown made Richie so uneasy he had to stop and put the album back beside its brother on the shelf.

Turned off of photo albums for the time being, Richie had spent the rest of his time in Mike’s apartment flipping through a copy of _Instructions for Practical Living and Other Neo-Confucian Writings_ by Wang Ying-Ming, most of which went over his head. His heart wasn’t in it anyway. He couldn’t be sure what was happening to Mike, and as scary as it’d been seeing Bill lose it as much as he had, at least it gave Richie a frame of reference.

As it turned out, his worries were mostly unfounded. Mike came out of it resolute, a pillar of strength. He had showered and dressed, and suggested they go buy some hamburgers and eat – and talk – in the bus. Get a game plan of what to do next. Richie had agreed, and they’d spent the next few hours talking through all of Bill’s thoughts on the matter (Mike had, not unkindly, teased Richie about the impromptu three-way, and it was, they both realized, the first time he’d cracked a smile since they’d reconnected. In Mike’s words ‘it’s been longer than that since I’ve had a good laugh, but you are the funny-man, isn’t that so?’)

When Richie explained how weird Mike had been, not moving at all, he’d covered his concern with humour, seeing that Mike had been receptive to it up to that point.

“I was worried you’d get thrombosis,” he joked, “and I’d have to _carry you_ to the hospital.”

“It sounds like some kind of sokushinbutsu,” Mike had observed.

“Sock-in-what-now?”

“Sokushinbutsu. I was reading this article not that long ago about how Buddhist monks – not all of them, obviously, but some of them – are able to meditate themselves into mummification. Sounds almost like I had a taste of that.”

“Was it meditative, then? That’s good – Bill had a hell of a time. He tried to immolate himself on our campfire.”

“It wasn’t… meditative, per say. It felt a lot like… well, have you ever had a dream where you know you’re dreaming? Where if you really focus you can just manage to… to turn the tide on what it is that’s happening – but it feels all… soupy and runny – reality. Do you know what I mean?”

“I think so, yeah.”

“Well, I was just… lying on this rock – I was Prometheus and these giant birds kept circling around above me and I knew that any minute now, they’d come down and eat my guts. I didn’t want it to go down that way, so I focused all my mind’s strength on changing the illusion in which I found myself.”

“Were there still birds after that?”

“In a manner of speaking. They were Hueys – a whole sky full of them, and I was back there – and it was worse than it ever was. I realized something then. Sometimes… sometimes running makes it a hell of a lot worse than just standing up and facing whatever it is that’s coming. I realized that, and I felt my control slipping so I just… just let it go. And the birds came back, and the jungle and the screaming was all gone and you know what?”

“What?”

“When they swooped down and started eating my insides, I _laughed._ What the fuck can some childhood ghost do to me that’s worse than what I’ve lived through already? I’m not scared of it, Richie. Not anymore.”

Richie nodded.

“That makes sense.”

“I know it. Listen, Richie – you go bring the stragglers home. I’ll have your back when it counts. Go on and get the others. Make them face it too, then bring them _home_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For anyone who needs to know (in no particular order:)
> 
> \- while the US army was officially not segregated in Vietnam, it was still very self-segregated because a lot of people in the service were coming in with the baggage that American race relations entail. There were also a LOT of veterans of colour - disproportionately so, statistically speaking. There's many reasons for this, but the short version is 'socioeconomics'. Vietnam is still often portrayed in media as a really 'white' war, but in fact, it's a lot more complex than that, and a lot of people had different experiences of it both while in the military, and then after coming home and being reintegrated into civilian life. It's worth looking into and reading about, if only to demystify the stereotype of the 'super ethical draft dodger who'd rather abandon his country than fight' - as a professor of mine said in a history class, every middle class white guy who left basically ensured a poorer, non-white guy would be more likely to get drafted and not be able to weasel out of it. Something to think about, anyway.
> 
> \- You can get the full text of 'Instructions for Practical Living and Other Neo-Confucian Writings' (the 1963 translation) by Wang Ying-Ming online. I'm working my way through it, though I will say that I, like Richie, am not as much of a reader as I could be. But translations of it are easy enough to find. But it's on archive.org if you're into that.
> 
> I feel like everyone knows what Hueys are, but if they don't, they're helicopters.
> 
> Also, I feel like everyone knows what Prometheus is. Not the movie, but the real one. But I always mix him up with Sisyphus so... Prometheus is the guy with the vulture eating his entrails. Sisyphus is the guy rolling the rock up a hill forever.
> 
> Sokushinbutsu is a real thing - really hard to do, too. but some monks can do it. you basically slowly mummify yourself alive while not eating/drinking... it's a real trip. well worth reading about just for the sheer strength of mind it must take to be able to do that. I can't even go like 10 minutes without wanting to move around or eat something. (I'd make a really shit monk.)


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you want to listen along:  
> I'm Going Down - Headstone Circus  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jvzCYfjZxI
> 
> I had a trip almost identical to this once. (Minus the mom imagery. In my case it was someone else.) In a way, it helped me heal from my own shit a lot too. I'm a believer there are no bad trips, just challenging ones. But, then again, this is It on a tab, so these are a little rougher/more manipulative than trips normally are.
> 
> I will say there are trigger warnings for this chapter because it will get rough, themeatically. You can skip this chapter and it won't impact the story (I mean stylistically it'd be better if you read it to get a sense of the whole thing, but you do you, according to your own limits.)
> 
> Warnings for:  
> (hallucinated) non-consensual sex/sexual violence, pestilence/disease/fear thereof, pseudoincest/mommy issues, inappropriate arousal to stimuli, revenge/murder (again, hallucinated), violence, REALLY BAD TRIP SITTING ETIQUETTE, weird intimacy issues
> 
> That should be everything. They say write what you know, so that's what I'm trying to do. I don't think this fic would benefit from me pulling punches. At that point, I might as well not write it at all. But I'll warn when I can, to be ethical. I'm not out here trying to fuck people up for sport.
> 
> Also on a much lighter note - I have to go to the gym, so if there are any glaring typos I've missed, I'll catch them when I get back.

* * *

_I’m going way down down down down_  
_Do you think you can help me?_  
_Well I’m going way down down down down_  
_Do you think you can stop me?_

_You go your way, I’ll go mine_

_I had a dream the other day_  
_I was walking in my sleep_  
_I didn’t know my own name_  
_Till I saw my own shadow_

– "I’m Going Down" - Headstone Circus

* * *

In the bus, Eddie is wailing. Richie wonders if it wouldn’t be better if he’d just scream like Bill, or better yet, sit quiet like Mike. This, though, is so much worse.

His head is thrown back – he’s writhing, pawing at his skin like he’s trying to rip it off. His pulse is high in his throat, a drum beat like machine gun fire, and his eyes roll like marbles. He alternates between cowering and convulsing, and twenty minutes in, Richie realizes he’s having some kind of seizure.

“Oh Christ, oh Christ, oh Christ,” he whimpers, hopeless. This is so beyond his expertise – he’s drunk – too drunk to intervene, stupid drunk like the stupid, no-good _loser_ he is, and Eddie needs him and he can’t – can’t think his way through.

Seizures. People choke on their tongues – that’s a thing, right? Richie has no tongue depressor, not even so much as a ballpoint pen, not in the front seat, and he doesn’t have time to go looking. Desperate, he grabs Eddie by the hair and holds him in place long enough to work his hand, sideways, into his foaming mouth.

It’s a bad choice. Eddie’s eyes lock on his, blood vessels bursting, and he bites down hard enough to hit bone.

“Ow, motherfuck!” Richie squeals, and now he can’t get his hand out if he wants to because Eddie’s got him like a dog and is kicking at him, fighting against his weight. When he finally spits, blood is smeared all over his mouth and chin and teeth. Richie curls around his wounded hand, retrieving the bandana he usually keeps on hand and fashioning a makeshift tourniquet. Eddie isn’t seizing anymore – that’s objectively a good thing, at least – but he’s still finding ways to break Richie’s heart in two.

“Getitofme,” he pleads, sobbing, “GetitOFFme!”

Richie dodges a kicking leg – the front of a bus is too cramped a place to be doing this in but he’ll be damned before he takes chances with the woods outside – and tries to grab Eddie – to steady him.

“It’s me – Eddie, it’s Richie Tozier, you remember? There’s nothing here – it’s in your head, man, it’s –”

Eddie does scream, then, and it’s so, so much worse than it was with Bill.

“You gotta fight it, Eds, you gotta fight – fight to remember, won’t you?”

“Get away!” Eddie begs, and turns suddenly, roughly, cracking his head on the dashboard.

“Shit!”

Richie surges forward, injured hand and all, and wraps Eddie in a full body hug, holding him tight against his chest.

“Fight it, man, I’ve got you. I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”

Gradually, Eddie stops fighting. Instead, he struggles feebly in the hold, weeping bitterly into Richie’s shoulder.

“Help me, Richie,” is muffled by shirt fabric. Richie jumps, startled, and pulls away enough to look Eddie in the eyes, cupping his cheeks, bringing their foreheads together.

“Do you know me? You remember?”

Could it be over so easy? So quick – just a goose egg on the head and a couple of stitches for Richie’s hand?

“Oh, god, make it stop, Rich… I can’t – I can’t stand it.”

Eddie’s breath hitches, his eyes filmy and unfocused.

“I’m sorry – I’m so sorry. I wish you didn’t – I love you.”

It comes completely out of left field – another classic Tozier impulse unchecked and chaotic. Richie blushes immediately – doesn’t matter if he’s been thinking it’s half true since he saw Eddie with his thumb up on the road into town, since the night in the hotel when he came running. No one’s ever run to Richie for anything before. _Yeah, no shit – look what a great fuckin’ help you are right now._

In the end, it doesn’t matter. Eddie can’t hear him – or at least, he can’t parse what’s going on. He’s too busy wriggling and tearing at his clothes – clawing at his stomach, and lower.

“Hurts,” he mumbles. “Hurts – Richie? Richie?”

“I’m here, I’m here.”

“Am I bleeding?”

Richie turns Eddie’s head, gentle, so gentle. There’s a bruise forming, but that’s it.

“No, you’re good. Hit your head but you’ll clean up fine – it’s my blood’s on your mouth, Spaghetti, you sort of bit –”

“It’s tearing me – oh god, it’s – it’s sick – don’t let it – don’t let it…”

“Don’t let it what? Eddie, what’re you seeing, man, I can’t help you if you don’t –”

“I’m torn,” he moans, “I’m torn,” and grabs Richie’s hand, and tries to drag it down beneath him.

The realization makes Richie want to throw up. That thing – that evil fucking thing – was making him think –

“I don’t want it – it’s got – disease – I don’t want it fucking that sickness in. It’s tearing my insides up, it hurts, it hurts, oh God –”

“It’s not, fuck, it’s not – look, I’ll prove it – it’s too real, right? Feels different – has sex ever felt like that? It’s a hallucination, Eds, think back to –”

“To _what_?” Eddie hisses, his voice breaking. “Richie, I’ve not got anything to think back _to._ ”

Richie didn’t think he could feel any more anger towards the thing, towards It, but he does, sure as he feels his heart breaking in real time, shattering into a million scattered pieces.

“Okay,” he whimpers, throat gone tight and clotted thick with phlegm, “it’s okay, Eds, think of… think of the last time you ate a sandwich, or washed your hands, or took a shower – it feels hyper-real in there, like your skin’s just one big nerve, but that ain’t real – that shit is just… just magic tricks from that thing, and you can fight – you can fight it and you’re gonna beat it, Eddie, I know you will, I know -”

And Richie’s crying too, crying hard, wishing he was more, better, _something._ He tries kissing Eddie’s cheek, because it’s there and he’s too worked up to think, but Eddie flinches, turning away in a fleeting moment of semi-lucidity.

“Richie,” he sobs, “don’t – I don’t want it turning into you.”

Richie forces himself to back up, then, not crowd, not get too close.

“Can I hold your hand?” he asks, hoping, praying that Eddie’s not slipped back under the surface. “Can I do that?”

And Eddie’s hand is suddenly in his – the injured one – _fuck_ – but he pushes through the pain and squeezes tight.

Gradually, the whimpering stops – his breathing changes. He wriggles again, and it’s different, this time. Richie doesn’t mean to glance down – honest to God, he doesn’t – but his eyes slip and once he sees the bulge in Eddie’s slacks, he can’t get the image out of his head.

“Made me weak,” Eddie mutters, slurring. “Primed me for it.”

He rolls over awkwardly, losing hold of Richie’s hand. His own hands tighten with purpose in the space beneath him, resting on the seat. He rolls his hips and slams his fists hard against the upholstery.

“You bitch,” he roars, “I’ll kill you for what you did to me! I’ll kill you!”

He’s strangling nothing, sweat standing out on the back of his neck. The temperature in the bus has risen to an uncomfortable level just by virtue of his activity. Richie isn’t afraid of Eddie – realistically, he’s still pretty sure he could take him in a fight if he had to – but he is afraid _for_ Eddie. This not-acid had dug up old fears, deep-seated anxieties in him – some of which he hadn’t told to Eddie, Mike, even Bill. The wolf had been bad – real bad – but it had been so much better than the hundred or so years it felt like he spent just running in a void, going up to faceless strangers trying to get a reaction out of them. Jokes first, but jokes had failed him. They hadn’t laughed, and he’d needed them to laugh more than anything – the silence was madness if you stayed too long. He'd pulled his intestines out like an endless string of coloured handkerchiefs, he'd stood on his head - then tore it off and _stood_ on it. He'd ripped himself apart. And still - cold, empty, nothing.

“Not your good boy,” Eddie spits, hips stuttering against the seat. “Not your baby. Fuck you, fuck you, FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU. DIE DIE _DIE D_ –”

He freezes, words catching in his throat, then begins to sob again.

“No. No, I didn’t want to – I didn’t mean to… come back. Please come back, I’m – I’m sorry. Please, I’m so… Richie?”

Richie sits bolt upright in his seat, startled out of his thoughts.

“Yeah?”

“No, Richie, don’t – don’t look at me like that. I’m sick, I’m – I’m rotten, really. Bad all the way through. Don’t – please. I don’t deserve it. I don’t…”

He stops fighting then, just cries and cries and cries until his cheeks are crusted over and his eyes are swollen.

The psychic attack, the violation, goes on for another thirty minutes. By the end, Eddie’s head is hanging down and he’s utterly lax, limbs floppy, just rocking gently from side to side. When even the crying and the struggling stops, and he goes quiet, breathing slow, Richie chances it and leans forward, gearshift digging painfully into his leg as he tries to keep it together.

_You gotta be you when he wakes up. You gotta have a laugh ready if he needs it – gotta be happy Richie, carefree Richie, so he knows he’s back, knows its you._

_God, let him wake up. Let him wake up sane.  
_

He’s still breathing. Richie tries to match the breaths – slow – in and out. It’s a kind of structural calm – if he relies on the infrastructure of those breaths, he can just about keep from going crazy.

At some point, the adrenaline wears off, and the booze in his system must be enough to sedate him, because the next thing he knows, it’s morning, and Eddie is nudging him awake.

“Get up,” he mumbles. “I’ve got to go to the bathroom.”

Richie gets up. He watches Eddie for any sign of… anything, but the man is completely blank. There’s nothing – not one thing – that gives his state of mind away. Quietly, Eddie opens the door to the bus, steps out into the too-bright morning, and walks sedately to the treeline. Richie looks away out of respect. When Eddie returns, Richie gets out and finds his own tree. As he relieves himself, he looks up at the golden sunlight trickling in through the canopy and wonders what in the hell is going on.

He can infer some of it, if not most of it. That fucking… _It_ had made Eddie suffer the kind of things hardest to leave behind in trips. At least the sea of faceless scornful non-humans was something Richie didn’t see when he was in the real world. Eddie had seen people he knew. Eddie had seen Richie.

He gets back in the bus and the two of them sit there in silence for about ten minutes. When Richie’s just about certain he’s gone out of his mind, Eddie starts to speak.

“It was in balance. It made me do both - hurt and be hurt.”

His voice wavers, but not enough to break.

“It… played on my fears. I knew it would, but I didn’t think it’d be… smart enough? Bold enough? I didn’t think it’d be like that.”

“It ra –” Richie begins, but can’t bring himself to say it. Eddie shakes his head forcefully.

“I can’t call it that. It wasn’t – it wasn’t like that. It was different. I can’t say how, but it was. There was no… no body. Nothing visible. Just the pressure of it. The pain and the smell of…” he shudders, “rot. Infection. Disease.”

Richie reaches for him with his good hand and Eddie laces their fingers together.

“I’ve avoided sex all my life. I always thought – I thought it was because of who I am. What I am. But it’s not. It’s because it’s dirty – it’s pestilent.”

“That sounds like your mother talking,” Richie ventures hesitantly. Eddie nods.

“It is. As it was happening I realized the voice that was telling me how bad it was – it was her voice. And once I realized that… it changed – the whole scene changed.”

He hiccups and swallows bile, shuddering again, his face screwed up in disgust.

“I was killing her,” he whispers. “I was killing her and I _liked it,_ Richie. I was – I was… _excited_ by it. And… God, compared to the first part of the trip, that was so much worse. I can’t even… be with myself, in the same space, in the same… head. I’m disgusting.”

“Don’t say that,” Richie says, rubbing his thumb over Eddie’s knuckles. “You aren’t the things you see when you’re in there.”

“I know I’m not a murderer, Richie,” Eddie snorted, shaking his head. “But the anger? The… the hurt? That’s _real._ That’s the core of me. I’m twenty-five years of hate condensed into one person. I should… I should be able to push past it. Turn the other cheek. She did her best, Ma did, after Dad died she tried her best with me. I know she struggled.”

“Fuck that. She had no right to treat you how she did – how she _does._ You don’t need to take that shit from anybody.”

“You said something similar,” Eddie smiles sadly, “right near the end, after I’d killed her and she’d gone all cold beneath me, you came and you found me and you said ‘you’re so worthy, Eddie, you’re so good, I’m so proud of you, getting this far.’ You said that.”

“Good for dream-me, I guess.”

“No, Richie – I hated it. I hated it more than I hated being sodomized by an amorphous cloud of miasma, and I hated it more than I hated killing my mother. I couldn’t run – my feet were stuck in place, and you just wouldn’t stop talking about how much you… cared about me.”

“I do care about you,” Richie interrupts.

“I care about you too,” Eddie nods, “but I’m so… frigid and fucked up that I don’t know what to do with that. I know it’s stupid that of all the things It did to me in that hallucination, it was the kindness that hurt most. But It did it because It knew that would be the hardest part of it, for me – the cherry on top of… of the shit sundae.”

Richie cracks a smile at ‘shit sundae’ – he can’t not, not hearing Eddie say it, and at the sight of it, Eddie laughs a small, pained laugh, and reaches up, thumbing along the line of Richie’s moustache, catching on his lower lip.

“I wish I was okay enough to kiss you again,” he admits quietly.

“You remember that?”

“Sure – it was less than twenty-four hours ago.”

“Yeah,” Richie nods, “but memory’s fucked these days.”

“Yeah.”

Eddie reaches for Richie’s other hand, only to flinch at the sight of it, wrapped in a bandana stiff with dried blood.

“Oh hell – did I do that?” he says, pained.

“You, uh… bit me. Bit it’s my fault – you started seizing so I was trying to catch your tongue.”

“Hell,” Eddie breathes again. “Look at us both, run ragged. I feel like I’m eighty years old.”

“You look pretty good for eighty,” Richie teases gently, and Eddie laughs with more warmth than before.

“You charmer.”

“So, what do you want to do now?” Richie asks, hesitant.

“Well, it’s like you said. We’ve got to kill this thing. Round the others up and put our heads or our – our third eyes or our auras or whatever together and end this. I’ll come with you.”

“You wouldn’t rather fly there?”

“No, I think… I think it _has_ to be by road.”

“Yeah, me too.”

Richie caresses the dashboard fondly.

“Well, she’ll get us there in one piece, anyway. When do you want to leave?”

“Today,” Eddie declares.

“What, like now today?”

“Why not?”

“You don’t have any stuff with you and my shit’s still at the hotel.”

“Well, we can grab your stuff.”

“What about you?”

Eddie runs a hand through his hair, tugging in frustration.

“I don’t know. I _really_ don’t want to see my mother just yet. I mean – I just –”

“I get it. What all do you need?”

“Medicine… no. I don’t really. Clothes… I can just share yours.”

He blushes a bit at the intimacy of that and Richie has to work to keep a straight face.

“Just until we get to a department store or something,” Eddie adds hastily. “I didn’t mean – I don’t – I’m sorry.”

Richie's good hand is hot and a bit sweaty, but it's grounding, comforting, as it holds Eddie's tight.

“You’ve got nothing to be sorry for, Spaghetti. Nothing at all.”

* * *

_The space you make has your own laws_  
_No longer human gods are cause_  
_The center of this house will never die._

\- "Slip Inside This House" - 13th Floor Elevators


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think this may just be the most hippie vibe thing I've ever put down into words.
> 
> I may wind up having to split more chapters up. I've kind of done that here, but there's a chance I can add what I was gonna add to this one to the next one so we'll see. I know what's yet to come, I just don't know how big/unwieldy it'll be.
> 
> Also I've decided I'm gonna link to the songs in question so you can listen along. (I'll retroactively add the rest later.) The entire Ford Theatre 1968 album 'Trilogy for the Masses' was pretty instrumental to me writing this but especially:
> 
> 101 Harrison Street  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaQMKcu-7fo
> 
> and 
> 
> Postlude  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZG0eurQsbI

* * *

_How much of the gift I bring_  
_Is given back without a care?_  
_How much did you take inside_  
_And give a welcome to and shelter there?_

\- "Postlude: Looking Back" – Ford Theatre

* * *

The rhythm of the road is soothing as being rocked in the arms of some cosmic guardian. Leaving Derry behind feels significant in a way that Eddie can’t put into words, but since leaving, he finds he doesn’t want to try. It’s enough just to be – the wind in his hair with the windows down until the autumn chill makes them admit defeat and seal themselves in like self-entombing clergymen in some unspecified dark age. Richie is buoyant, flying high on an Icarus trajectory, straight for the sun. He smokes a single unending train of cigarettes, lighting one off the other and throwing the butts into a beer that’s sat half-empty for more than a week. By some miracle, his bitten hand heals – stiff and sore for the time being, but not infected. The days become weeks, and the road stretches on ahead.

They leave the radio turned on always, and they lose themselves in the safety of it – other voices not their own, not connected to their strange quest. Richie sings along and imitates the radio men, the politicians, the sports casters, glancing frequently to his passenger for a grin or a chuckle of approval, and Eddie is surprised to find he has smiles to share.

Eddie emerges from the cocoon of his own subconscious a man transformed. As the miles pass beneath the bus wheels, he changes, in the hopeful, surging way that green shoots grow from a seed, from being a young man who felt nauseous if he didn't clean his hands before eating, whose understanding of the Devil’s lettuce was theoretical in nature, someone who shunned the sensuality of the body and feared the mysteries of the spirit, to someone who smokes grass daily, who eats unwashed farmers’ market apples from the basket with the stems still on and chases the juice down his wrists and forearms with his tongue. He reaches over when Richie cracks a joke that really gets him and lets his hand rest against the back of Richie’s neck, fingers fanning through copper strands. Sometimes, he surprises himself, and jokes back, and that always brings peals of delighted laughter bubbling up from Richie’s throat.

They laugh a lot, for men heading to what they both, privately, fear will surely end in death, or something just as bad, if not worse. Richie drives with the abandon of someone who knows and trusts his vehicle more than he knows and trusts his own chemically altered mind, one hand braced loose on the wheel, one palm down on Eddie’s upper thigh, warm through the denim of borrowed jeans that Eddie has to use a shoestring to hold up since neither of them thought to bring a belt and they keep forgetting to buy one at any of their pit-stops.

They live in the bus, on the road, subsisting on a diet of trail mix, beef jerky, and whatever they can get stopping here and there for church suppers. As they pass through New York on their journey West, they’re fed by Hare Krishnas, and Eddie, inspired and left starry-eyed by such culinary and spiritual wonders denied him back in Derry, insists they buy their own supply of dried legumes in case they ‘run out of options’. The bags of beans and lentils make supportive pillows, if nothing else. They sleep in the back, all nestled up together among tapestries and rugs and a big, handmade afghan – the only thing Richie still has that his ex-wife ever gave him. They piss in roadside ditches, they wash in rest-stop sinks, or with rain water they collect in an old plastic bucket when the weather is obliging. Eddie, to Richie’s surprise, starts growing a beard – and to Richie's delight, lets Richie shave it into sideburns that stretch low along his jaw, framing his angel face.

* * *

_How much does it mean to you?_  
_Is what I said still on your mind_  
_How much did you take with you?_  
_How many words did you leave behind?_  
_I’d like to know_  
_Which way the winds are blowing_  
_I’d like to know_  
_The pathway of your searching_  
_Secret journey_  
_I’d like to know._

\- "Postlude: Looking Back" – Ford Theatre

* * *

Bev is the first one they track down. She’s been stuck in Ohio since her biker man got himself locked up for rearranging a cop’s face. Smoking like a chimney, she looks sick – thin, shaky, and sad, tobacco staining bone-white fingers. She doesn’t need convincing to leave the motel she’s been living in and to hop aboard. On her first night with them, she takes her tab – Eddie proves to be a much more natural guide for these things than Richie, less panicky with his own trip so fresh in his mind. She’s only out for a day and a half – the potency of the things is either fading, or somehow, It knows that they’re on a schedule now, an end in mind, and It’s hurrying things along to the great crescendo on the mountain top. They splurge for a hotel room – Richie’s adamant he wants no more tripping in the van. When Bev comes out of it, she showers for an eternity, and comes out of the bathroom with no makeup on and her hair hanging free. She throws the contents of her makeup bag in the little trash can under the chintzy in-room desk and says she’s done ‘dolling herself up for men who only care because she’s hiding the bruises.’ After that, they make tracks for Georgia, and never talk about her recent past again.

* * *

_I think you’re looking round for something you can’t find here_  
_You’re hiding your head and just trying to hide your fears_  
_But now there’s something else on your mind_  
_And you’re trying to find_  
_Who you belong to_

_Visions you’re dreaming – they’re only in your mind_  
_And your crying is only a waste of time_  
_But now there’s no place left to go_  
_And you’re trying to know_  
_Who you belong to_

_And you’re free_  
_But you just can’t see it_  
_You don’t believe it and you’re making your mind up_

_It can’t be true_  
_It can’t happen to you_  
_You’re afraid to do what you should’ve done a long time ago_

\- "101 Harrison Street" – Ford Theatre

* * *

Even with the three of them brainstorming, Richie’s still not sure how the hell they’re going to get Stan to agree to this when they roll the bus up in his driveway on a weeknight. Neighbours peep at them from between fluttering curtains – this is not the neighborhood to wear your hair long or look like you just got back from a sit-in. In the end, Bev’s the one who takes charge – stronger than either of her boys when the moment counts. She speaks pleadingly to Patricia in the kitchen, the murmur of voices too low for those not allowed into the sanctuary of sisterhood taking place behind the closed door. In the nave that is the Uris living room, Richie and Eddie try to wear Stan down with a double dose of verbal erosion, but Stan is stubborn and certain he has no interest in altering his consciousness, not for anything. In the end, it’s the women who save them – Bev returning with a small but genuine smile, and Patricia, asking Stan to ‘come and help prepare something so your friends can eat.’

They sit in silence, bright corduroy and buckskin, peasant shirts and belts Bev wove for them in transit with macrame tied round her toe, a motley crew that doesn’t suit the clean lines of the couch or matching chairs.

An agreement is reached – a compromise of sorts. Stan will go down to Texas without taking his tab. Patricia will go with him. They will meet in El Paso and work things out from there. In Stan’s words, ‘we’ll be flying down – some of us work for a living.’

Still – he gives them his word and, in the same way they’ve known anything thus far, they know that he will keep it.

* * *

_Draw from the well of unchanging_  
_Its union nourishes on_  
_In the right re-arranging_  
_Till the last confusion is gone_  
_Water-brothers trust in the ultimust_  
_Of the always singing song they pass along._

\- "Slip Inside This House" - 13th Floor Elevators

* * *

Ben agrees to fly in too – they have to try five times to get him, and when at last their leads – words of mouth from drunken undergraduates – bear fruit, they’re in Alabama, standing outside at a payphone. Richie has a finger in his ear, trying to block out the sound of truck stop patrons whistling at Bev. The phone number, copied in Eddie’s neat hand, escapes Richie’s grip and flutters to the ground, where it is taken by the breeze when the call connects. The sound of a frat house party filters through.

“Is there a Ben Hanscom there?”

“Yeah – it’s me – whose this?”

“It’s Richie.”

“Richie? Richie Tozier?”

“Last time I checked. Look – there’s no easy way to tell you this but – I need you to fly to El Paso to come take acid with me, and to see Bill.”

“Alright.”

“It’s just to – what, alright?”

“Sure! Why the hell not – exams are over and I don’t have any plans for Thanksgiving.”

Richie raises a fist in quiet triumph, unblocking his ear. Good old Ben.

“Attaboy, Haystack – that’s what I like to –”

“Hey, girlie – why don’t you show us what you’ve got under that shirt!” one of the local louts hollers, and Bev turns from her bus-side conversation with Eddie to face them.

“Bev…” Eddie begins, but she’s already stepping forwards.

“Who, me?” she asks, all sickly sweet.

“Yeah, c’mon girl. Forget about those pussies you’re travellin’ with. Those fairies don’t know how to treat a woman.”

“Bev!” Richie hisses, but she’s already got her hand under her shirt, as though she seriously means to take it off.

“Alright!” one trucker cheers. “If there’s one thing I like about you hippie chicks it’s that you don’t waste your time wearin’ no bras on under your –”

She pulls her hand free, flipping them the bird, and at the sight of their stunned faces, throws her head back and cackles.

“Go back to rubbing it out on your own, you creep – I wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot pole!”

One of them throws his half-full cola at her and she has to jump out of the way to stay dry. She’s laughing still, so hard that Eddie can’t help but join her.

“What’s going on out there?” Ben crackles over the phone-line. “You guys sound like you’re really in the thick of it!”

A particularly angry trucker reaches for something in his cab and the next thing Richie knows, there’s a pistol in the fucker's hand.

“Jesus – gotta go, Ben, see you in Texas!” Richie shouts, slamming the phone down in the receiver as Eddie puts the bus in gear and Bev dives into the back. He chases after them¸ yelping as a shot goes wide and pings off the edge of the payphone where he’d just been standing.

“Jump, Richie!” Bev yells, and he does, landing hard in the back in a tangle of pashminas, mashing his face into a bag of chickpeas. As they pull away from the stop, Eddie tips his head back and howls like a wild man, like a wolf, and Bev joins in, yipping in victory. Richie catches his breath, splayed on the floor, then surges for Bev, catching her about the waist and pulling her down with him. The three of them laugh until they want to throw up. They laugh, and laugh, and laugh.

* * *

_I’d like to know_  
_The song you sing in silence_  
_I’d like to know_  
_The vision that you follow_  
_Secret worship_  
_I’d like to know._

\- "Postlude: Looking Back" - Ford Theatre


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you want to listen along
> 
> Sit Down I Think I love you - The Growing Concern (1968)  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ-tICkwoxY
> 
> Broke this chapter into 2 parts. This is part 1. Some canoodling and fluff before the scary shit happens. Also I'm Canadian, so if you wonder why my spellings of words have way too many 'u's in them, that's why.
> 
> Also, yes, I did look up the weather data for El Paso in November, 1973, just so I could guesstimate appropriately. I am actually that much of a nerd lmao.

* * *

“Do you want to swap rooms with me?”

Richie looks up, startled, to find Bev standing in the open door to his hotel room’s bathroom.

“Jesus, Bev, don’t you know better than to sneak up on a guy when he’s shaving?”

“Sorry,” she says, and blows air in his face, sending some of his lather flying off into space. He raises an eyebrow.

“Really, now?”

“I’ll stop.”

Turning back to the mirror, Richie carefully aligns his razor, shaving delicately around the side of his moustache.

“What’s so bad about your room?”

“Nothing’s bad about it,” Bev shrugs. “But it’s got Eddie in it.”

“Well, we agreed – we can’t afford more than two rooms, we flipped for it – you got Eddie. They barely wanted to rent to us at all, but it’d have looked a lot worse if they thought you weren’t married to one of us, and we were bunking up. I know I’m hard to resist, darlin’, but I’ve already unpacked. If you want me, you’ll have to move in here.”

Bev snorts.

“I’m just saying, now that we’ve _rented_ the room as Mr. and Mrs. Newlyweds, why can’t we switch? I want the space. You want Eddie. Eddie wants you. What’s the problem?”

Richie sets his razor down and turns to look at her with all the seriousness a man can wear on a face half-covered in shaving cream.

“What do you mean, ‘I want Eddie?’ You know what they say about assumptions – they make an ass out of U and ME.”

“Yeah, yeah, but you forget – I’ve lived in a bus with you since Ohio.”

“So?”

“So, you talk in your sleep, Richie Tozier, and Eddie may be a heavy sleeper, but I’m _not._ ”

Richie genuinely feels scandalized – not so much that she knows, but that she’s known for weeks and hasn’t said anything.

“You heard my sleep-talking and you’re telling me now? Like this? Bev, girl, that’s a goldmine! You could’ve run me through until I was swiss cheese with that one.”

“Not all of us have your knack for jokes,” she shrugs. “Besides, I didn’t want to embarrass Eddie.”

“Oh, but when it comes to me, it’s open season.”

“If I have to listen to you getting all lovey-dovey in dreamland, you can stand to suffer for it just a little.”

“Mm, that’s fair enough,” Richie concedes. He finishes the final pass of the blade, then rinses it, and his face, straightening up to inspect his handiwork. Bev passes him the hotel face cloth.

“Very nice. You almost look like a gentleman.”

“Thanks for warning me – I’ll have to undo another button on my shirt to make up for it.”

“So, do you want to swap rooms or not?”

“What, and pack up the eight pieces of clothing I have to my name? After slaving away for all of ten whole minutes throwing them in the -”

“Beep beep, Richie. Come on, I asked you a serious question.”

“That was your first mistake.”

_“Richie.”_

Richie stares at himself in the mirror. He’s not a bad looking guy, really, if you can get around the nose – _it’d take a team of Sherpas 3 months to navigate that landmark._

“Does Eddie mind?”

“Eddie’s the one who wants you over there in the first place.”

Richie drops his gaze. Saying it out in the open, to Bev, in the middle of the day, is just plain impossible.

“I’ll take that as a yes, then,” she says, and leaves with a spring in her step.

* * *

_Sit down, I think I love you_  
_Anyway, I’d like to try_  
_I can’t stop thinking of you_  
_If you go I know I’ll cry_

\- "Sit Down I Think I Love You" - The Growing Concern

* * *

The hotel in El Paso is cheap, but not run-down. It’s better than most of the places Eddie’s stayed at since his sojourn began, so he can’t complain, really. It has air conditioning – November in Texas is nothing like November in Maine – it’s been hovering around 81 degrees since they got in and Eddie’s melting on the uncomfortable side of warm.

“At least the nights are cool here,” he says to the empty room, putting the last of his clothes away. They’d stopped at a second-hand store before they arrived and Eddie had bought what he privately called ‘normal clothes,’ though around the others he’d agreed they made him look uptight. He passed for ‘normal’ easier than Richie and was certainly more comfortable with playing the Mr. to Bev’s Mrs. on the hotel reservation. Richie, officially, was Eddie’s brother-in-law in this particular charade, and he was coming with them to ‘show them around the hiking trails.’

Realistically, the three of them reeked of patchouli and dope, and their bus stood out like a sore thumb in the lot of conservative family cars, but the plausible deniability gave the hotel staff peace of mind enough to serve them and for that, Eddie is grateful. He’s not sure what awaits them on Bill’s paradise mountain, but he’s sure it’ll hurt before it heals him. He’s happy for the respite now.

Putting his visions behind him had been easier than he would’ve thought. The pain of it clicked something into alignment – an old dislocation he had never noticed before. Now, he’s caught himself thinking sometimes, when the sun’s hit Richie’s hair just right, or the warm haze of chemical oblivion laps at the shore of his consciousness, ‘how’d you go walking around all these years with your soul hanging out of its socket like that? Didn’t you notice you couldn’t move it right?’

It’s scary, the things a person can get used to if they get used to them young.

“Knock knock.”

It’s Richie, standing in the doorway in an unbuttoned paisley shirt and jeans so tight that Eddie feels like they must be pinching his balls and he’s just too proud to say so.

“Who’s there?” he asks indulgently.

“Your new roommate, that’s who. Bev’s swapped with me.”

Eddie, flustered, turns back to pairing his socks. His stuff has mostly been living in a brown paper bag in the bus, but there’s no sense keeping it messy while they’re indoors.

“What the hell are you doing?” Richie barks. “Leave those socks alone, Mister. It’s a step too far!”

“What – organizing my socks?”

“Sure. Next thing you know, you’ll be as uptight as Stan.”

“Oh, come on, he’s not _that bad,_ Richie.”

“Yeah, well, I’ll reserve judgement for when he actually shows up.”

Eddie shakes his head, smiling in spite of himself. He takes his last socks in hand and Richie swears in protest.

“If you pair those socks, I’ll shoot myself.”

“I’m doing it,” Eddie laughs, and Richie attempts to vault over the bed to stop him, only to fall short half-way there, his legs lacking the necessary mobility.

“Those pants are gonna get you in a bind someday,” Eddie teases. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“Yeah, well,” Richie rolls onto his stomach with a groan and props himself up on his elbows, “you like looking at me in them enough that that makes you a hypocrite of the highest order.”

Eddie places his last pair of socks in the pile with the others at the foot of the bed.

“What makes you think that?”

“That you’re a hypocrite?”

“The other thing.”

“You mean you don’t like looking at my ass in these things? Even I like looking at it, and it’s my ass!”

He attempts a pose, there, splayed on the bed.

“Body of a god – look at me, damn it. Worship me.”

“Beep beep, Richie,” Eddie says fondly, and tousles his hair. Richie jerks his head away, pouting.

“Beeped twice in less than ten minutes. Am I losing my edge? Is that it?”

“Sure. I think it’s terminal.”

Eddie’s hand has found its way back to his hair. Richie looks up, bemused.

“You’re cute.”

Eddie grins.

“You’re cute yourself.”

“I’m serious. Smiling suits you.”

Eddie’s smile goes from amused to soft. Affectionate. He pets Richie’s hair like Richie’s the luckiest dog in the whole damn universe.

“I’m serious too,” he says quietly. “I think you’re really handsome.”

“Yeah, for a big goof, maybe.”

“I think you have… sexy eyebrows.”

That all but kills Richie, and he laughs until there are tears in his eyes. Blinking them away, he sees the sour look on Eddie’s face and frowns.

“Oh, come on, don’t look at me like that. I’m not laughing at you. I just – sexy eyebrows. God in Heaven.”

“Well, I do,” Eddie states firmly. “I like your eyebrows.”

He runs his finger over it for emphasis.

“I like your smile.”

Richie tries to bite his finger as it passes over his lips.

“I like your moustache.”

“Tickle me like that again and I’ll sneeze.”

“I like your nose –”

“Oh, now I just _know_ you’re crazy!”

Eddie furrows his brow.

“What? What’s wrong with your nose?”

“What’s wrong with – Eds, they could use it as a replacement for the Empire State Building if they ever lose track of the damn thing!”

“That’s… that’s not true. It’s a fine nose!”

“Yeah, well, enjoy it while you can. Once all this nightmare’s behind us I’m high-tailing it outta here and going straight to Hollywood to have some guy in a white coat get rid of it. Maybe if you’re lucky, they’ll let you keep it in a jar.”

“Richie!”

Eddie looks horrified. Richie rolls his eyes.

“I’m not _actually cutting it off,_ Spaghetti, I’m just cutting it down. You know – the way you prune those little ornamental trees so the weight of them doesn’t pull the whole pot ov–”

Richie’s silenced by Eddie’s lips pecking him right on the end of his nose.

“Richie,” Eddie smiles, “you’re ridiculous.”

“Sure, I am,” Richie breathes, eyes wide. “I’ll be anything you want me to be if it’ll get me a repeat of that.”

“You want another one?”

“Hell yeah, I do – I’ve only been waiting since _Maine_ for Christ’s sake.”

Eddie falters.

“Since then? Really?”

“Yeah. Why, is that a problem?”

“No! No, just… you never tried to kiss me. I assumed… well, I don’t know what I thought it was we _were_ doing, but I just figured kisses weren’t part of it.”

“I did so try to kiss you!” Richie protests before he can stop himself. “I did and you told me no!”

He feels the chill descend over the room the same minute Eddie pulls away, face crumpling slightly like an old apple.

“When?”

“Eds, that’s not impor–” Richie backpedals.

“It was during. In the bus. Oh _God,_ Richie…”

He sits on the mattress and buries his head in his hands.

_Nice going, idiot. Now you’ve made him cry._

“Hey, hey, Spaghetti, don’t – look it’s not… I’m not… please don’t be sad because of me. I didn’t mean to say it – you know how I get. God, I’m such a piece of shit.”

“No, you’re not,” Eddie sighs, sniffing. “I’m the one being a cold fish.”

“You’ve got every right to be a cold fish after what It did to you.”

“Richie…” Eddie turns on the bed and stares at him with wet eyes. “It didn’t do anything. It was a hallucination.”

“It’s still –”

“No. It isn’t. I don’t know what… _that_ would feel like. But this was different.”

He says it so earnestly that Richie’s can’t help but ask.

“How do you mean different?”

“Because it helped me see myself – all the sides of myself. I don’t think It meant to do that. I think It meant to break me. It keeps trying to break all of us but look how much stronger we are after facing It in those dreams – Bill with his mountain, Mike with his philosophy, Bev with her newfound confidence. Me being… myself. Letting myself want you. We’ve all been fortified by accident.”

“Not me.”

He doesn’t mean for it to come out like it does, tinged all with longing.

“Oh, Richie…”

“Don’t ‘Oh, Richie’ me – it’s just the truth, is all. I’m happy for you – all of you – but it wasn’t like that for me.”

“What _was_ it like? The wolf?”

Richie shakes his head.

“Not the wolf.”

The fields, the planes, grey swirling mist, and Richie stumbling through on too-short, child’s legs. All around him figures looming tall turned their non-faces away from him. Without his chucks, he was as good as useless, and any jokes he made had nowhere to go in this sea of earless, eyeless beings. Without something – anything – good attention, _bad_ attention – he unspooled like so much red thread, unweaving his sinews, his veins, his arteries. His circulatory system flapped in the wind as he ran, and he threw him down at the feet of the cold, unmoving giants and screamed until his throat filled with blood _See Me! See Me! For the love of God, somebody see me! See me so I can see that I’m real, that I’m here, that I’m something worth keeping – even for a cheap laugh, even for a punching bag – because the abyss is looking into me and there ain’t nothing here, just an empty shirt, empty shoes, empty pants, empty skin –_

“I know it’s stupid, letting It get to me. I just… I already thought that before. Now it just feels like I’ve had it confirmed by an outside observer.”

“Richie,” Eddie insists, “you’re not empty.”

“Yeah, well. Sometimes I feel it. Why do you think I started getting into all this psychedelic shit? I wanted answers. I still want answers. I’ve fried my brain like a damn egg on the pavement on a hot day and I’ve still got nothing to show for it. How the hell do I justify taking up space if I can’t even… be a real person? That’s what she said, you know – my ex-wife. ‘Sometimes it’s like you’re not a real person. You’re just jokes on jokes on jokes on nothing.’ And she was right, Eds – there’s nothing underneath.”

“That’s bullshit. You’re as real as I am. As Bev, as Bill, as Mike – we’re all screwed up, I’ll give you that. Hell, it’s a miracle we made it to adulthood in one piece – but we’re not _nothing._ I’m not nothing.”

“I don’t think you are.”

“Then you’re not either. Because to me, you’re something. You’re a pretty great something, if you really want to know the truth.”

Richie’s chest goes warm and he has to hide his face in the bedspread.

“Would you look at the thread count of these sheets? You could –”

“I love you. I love you so much.”

Richie freezes, taking it in, then rolls over, eyes shining with genuine wonder.

“No shit – you mean that?”

“Sure, I mean it.”

“You… even when I’m being a ham?”

“Even at your hammiest.”

“I’d sell my soul to the devil himself if it meant you’d lay one on me right here, right now,” Richie groans huskily, rolling full onto his back and looking up in expectation. Eddie leans over him and presses a tender, closed-mouth kiss to the corner of his mouth.

“God damn,” Richie croaks, “you’ve got some magic in you, Eddie Kaspbrak. You’re doing things to me… God, what you’re doing to me… and I’ve never even had your tongue in my mouth.”

Eddie’s smile wavers a bit.

“About that. I don’t really – I mean I haven’t – I’m not a good kisser.”

“Says who?”

“Says me – I’ve never kissed anyone before you, Richie.”

“Eddie, that’s the most flattering thing I’ve ever heard in my life. You really want it to be me?”

“Do you see anyone else around here?” Eddie teases. “Yes, yes I want it to be you.”

“Well go on, brother, I’m game if you are.”

Eddie leans in slow, and it’s like time goes sideways, fizzles out the edges of Richie’s mind. He moans and opens for Eddie’s shy tongue, content to just chase it around with his own until they both suffocate. Eddie’s the one who pulls away – Richie resolves to kiss him until he, too, abandons the biological imperative to breathe.

“Oh wow…”

He looks so good, even if the kiss was sloppy, even if there’s spit all on his chin and his eyes are slightly crossed, trying to focus on Richie when Richie’s face is so close to his own. Richie’s sure he looks even more debauched himself, and that’s just fine, because Eddie’s leaning in again, lying down now, chest to chest, diagonally, on the hotel bed, feet dangling out into space.

“You’re the real deal, man. You’re my Helen of Troy or something – I’d move mountains for you,” Richie mumbles. Eddie’s amused huff of breath tickles his moustache.

“What the hell are you talking about?” he whispers between kisses.

“God, I don’t know, I don’t have any blood left in my brain,” Richie admits, laughing. “These pants are killing me.”

“Told you they were too tight,” Eddie chuckles, and he glances down demurely, eyelashes casting delicate shadows on his cheeks that Richie feels blessed to see up close.

“You like?” he prompts, canting his hips forwards, the hard line of his cock unmistakable in the skin-tight denim.

“That’s – just from kissing? You’re a cheap date.”

“When’d you get funny, huh? That’s my line.”

“Mm – you’re rubbing off on me.”

“Oh, I am, am I?”

Richie rolls them sideways and then they’re cock to cock, and damned if Eddie isn’t just as into this as he is.

“You little hypocrite – what’s that, a banana in your pocket?”

Richie bucks into that answering hardness and any retort Eddie has planned gets caught in his throat.

“Oh, Richie – a- _ah_ – your moustache tickles…”

“You love it.”

Richie can’t think of a time he’s had so much fun just kissing and petting and fooling around. The novelty of it being a man is groovy in the way he figured it would be after his experience of being the cheese in a Bill-Audra sandwich, but the fact that it’s Eddie – little Eddie all grown up and innocent, Eddie who likes his nose and his corny jokes and his _sexy eyebrows_ – it’s wonderful.

“I could get addicted to this,” he admits, finding Eddie’s hand and pulling it up to his mouth. He presses a hot, wet kiss to the palm, fanning the fingers out, then takes Eddie’s thumb in his mouth.

“Jesus – Richie – if you do that I’m going to – I’m gonna go crazy.”

“You’re already crazy. You’re crazy for me. I’m crazy for you.”

“Yeah but – Richie –”

“Mmm…”

“Richie – the door – someone’s knocking on the –”

“Hmm?”

Richie pauses halfway through sucking what he’s sure would be a prize-winning hickey onto Eddie’s throat. Sure enough – someone’s knocking.

“What do you want?” he says with palpable irritation.

“Don’t you want to know who it is?”

He can hear the laughter in Bev’s voice.

“You’d better let me up,” Eddie mutters, and wriggles out of reach. Richie watches him struggle to make himself presentable for a minute or two before he states the obvious.

“You’ve got a friction burn over your mouth from my ‘stache.”

Mortified, Eddie rushes towards the vanity in the corner, studying himself in the mirror.

“It’s not – is it that bad? Is it obvious?”

“I mean, it’s red – nobody’ll know _why_ it’s red.”

“I can’t answer the door like this.”

In response, Richie sits up, gesturing pointedly at his lap.

“You could use me as a coat rack right now, Spaghetti. Door’s your job.”

“Get that under control,” Eddie retorts as he treks around the perimeter of the bed to get to the door. Uncomfortable, Richie hides the worst of the problem under a pillow.

“Hi Bev,” Eddie says haltingly, letting her into the room. She takes one look at Richie and cracks up.

“Oh, go ahead, laugh at me the one time I’m _not_ trying to be funny,” he mutters, glowering.

“Sorry for interrupting, casanova. I just thought I should tell you – Stan and Patty just pulled into the parking lot.”

“How do you know it’s them?” Richie asks, which, admittedly, he realizes is kind of a stupid question.

“Uh… Georgia plates? Also, they look like Stan and Patty? I called out the window - they waved?”

“Right.”

“I’m gonna go downstairs to meet them in the lobby.”

“We’ll come too – just give us a minute,” Eddie concedes, and ushers Bev back out the door. “Right – up and at ‘em, Tozier. The day’s a-wasting.”

“First you want me up, then you want me down, now you want me up again...”

“Richie.”

“Okay, okay, hold your horses.”

It takes them another ten minutes, but they get downstairs in time to help bring the bags in from Stan’s rental car, and if Stan or Patricia notice the redness around Eddie’s lips and throat, they don’t say one thing about it.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this chapter is late. Double whammy of the end of a work-related deadline (now complete) plus my mom just broke her ankle so that threw everything for a loop. She'll be alright - it was actually lucky that she wasn't more injured (fucking icy-ass Canadian roads) but she's okay now, I'm okay now, everything's fine.
> 
> Here's like... a fuck-ton of just pure sex.
> 
> Also the song in question is damn good. (It's track 2 of 2 on this album so I'm just linking the whole thing.) All the songs I link are good, I think, but this one is just... what a fucking bop. I'm keeping it in my arsenal so that *I* can have sex to this song at some point. It's that good. The other track on the album (track 1 of 1) is equally good if you like a good jazz flute - IMO, a bit of jazz flute can actually be far superior to most sex. There's just something about the way the notes float around. If you've seen that one scene in Anchorman about jazz flutes... yeah that's me in a nutshell. Love that shit. I listened to this album (both tracks) for the entire time I was writing this chapter. So. Fucking. Good.
> 
> Sweet Smoke - Just a Poke full album (1970)  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJ36d28plgc&t=749s

* * *

The hotel’s honeymoon suite, where newlyweds Bev and Eddie Smith are to -allegedly - be staying, has a heart-shaped bathtub, a mirrored bathroom ceiling, and a vibrating bed. There are various massage oils and even rose petals discretely tucked away in the nightstand. The walls are thick enough to ensure more privacy than any of them have had living in the bus or in cheap motels along the highway – and yet, all that is up in the room, and Richie is down in the hotel’s adjoining buffet-style restaurant, half listening to Stan tell a story about how they ‘almost thought the airport had lost their suitcase, but it turned out they’d just missed it on the baggage carousel,’ and half losing himself in the kind of pornographic fantasizing that could probably get a man committed for being a sex maniac.

Eddie, oblivious, just nods along with Stan’s story, sighing and mm-ing sympathetically at all the right times, and all Richie can think of is how he sighed and mm-ed for a whole other reason on the bed upstairs – the bed where, right now, he’d give his left nut and both his kidneys to be.

He can’t watch Eddie picking at a dinner roll any longer – the restless motion of his fingers and the slight tilt of his head are driving Richie crazy. Instead, he shovels the rest of his food into his mouth, pats his stomach, and loudly declares,

“Who’s for seconds? Bev? Sure – why don’t you come with me?”

Bev looks down at the three asparagus spears still on her plate, but gets up regardless, and trots along behind Richie until they’re far enough away from the others – and the rest of the restaurant’s patrons – to talk openly.

“You’ve gotta get me outta here.”

“Oh, come on, the food isn’t that bad!”

“I’m jumping outta my skin – Bev, honey, I love Stan and Patty, they’re swell, I mean that, but I am dying over here. Dying! My balls are bluer than the earth from space – you’ve gotta help me. Keep them busy – talk them into taking you to a movie – _anything_ – but leave me and Eddie out of it.”

“I don’t want them to feel like you’re avoiding them after they’ve come all this way,” she begins. Richie shakes his head.

“They won’t. Please – _please_ – Bev, I’ve never been so serious in all my life – Ben’s coming tomorrow, Mike’s coming tomorrow, would you please just let us have today? I’d do the same for you – you know I would.”

Bev considers this, then nods, and Richie visibly sags with relief.

“Oh, I could kiss you,” he praises, and she laughs.

“Save it for you-know-who.”

They get back to the table and Stan looks at them, confused.

“I thought you were getting seconds.”

“Change of plans – I’m too tired to eat and I’m going to bed. All that driving’s worn me out.”

Richie stares a hole through Eddie, willing him to catch on with his mind. _Come on, come on, come on._

_Pick it up, Spaghetti man, pick it –_

“Yeah, I’m pretty tired too. We’ve been splitting the driving.”

_Hallelujah!_

“Well, I’m not,” Bev shrugs. “What do you say we settle up and then go catch a movie? Or – oh, there’s got to be a museum around here someplace!”

“I’d like to stop at a department store and get a sun hat,” Patty interjects, and that’s all it takes to sway Stan. Just like that, he’s out of Richie’s hair. God, he could kiss Patty, too.

* * *

_Well, now, Sa-Sa-Sally_   
_Hey, be with me tonight_   
_I got a thing I wanna show you_   
_Hey, be with me tonight_   
_We're gonna ride it together_   
_'Cause we're hypnotized_   
_Oh, now, Sa-Sa-Sally_   
_Hey, be with me tonight_

\- "Silly Sally" - Sweet Smoke

* * *

Stan insists on paying for lunch, which is fine by Richie, and then on asking Eddie about which roads, if any, to avoid when passing through downtown, which is less fine because the conversation seems to last a thousand years. When finally, _finally,_ they leave, Richie all but chases Eddie up to the suite and, once they’re safely inside with the door locked behind them, he pounces like a wild animal, kissing the surprised look right off Eddie’s face.

“I thought that we’d never get outta there,” he admits, against the warm skin of Eddie’s throat. “I’m losing my mind. Watching you eat was doing me in.”

“It was?” Eddie seems genuinely surprised and pleased by this revelation.

“You tell me,” Richie purrs, grinding his cock against the seat of Eddie’s slacks for emphasis.

“You’re insatiable.”

“You can only say that if I’m like this _after_ we’ve made love. Look at this bed – have you seen it?”

“Of course. We were in here before, remember?”

“Yeah, but do you know what this is?”

Richie scrambles over the mattress like a lunatic in his haste to get to the coin slot.

 _“Magic Fingers,_ sugar. You got a quarter?”

Eddie searches his pockets and hands him one.

“The trick with these babies is to kind of jam the lever – you got a piece of cardboard?”

“What do I look like, a junk drawer?”

“Go see if you can borrow a bobby pin from Bev's handbag or something.”

“Why would she have a bobby pin? She hasn’t worn one once in all the time we’ve traveled together. She hasn't had a handbag, either, for that matter.”

“Or an elastic band or a – something, Jesus, Eddie, get creative!”

“Okay, okay!”

Eddie leaves and Richie takes the opportunity to fling some of the nightstand rose petals around and change into his favourite underwear – white crocheted briefs with an open weave. He leaves his socks on because with the AC cranked up, the room’s a little chilly. When Eddie comes back, scotch tape in hand, stolen from God knows where, he falters in the doorway, then bolts in and slams it behind him.

“Richie! What if I was somebody else?”

“So, I’d tell them I’d gotten the wrong room by accident – did you get the – attaboy! Give it here and come sit down next to me.”

Eddie obeys, shy interest lighting up his eyes.

“Okay,” Richie continues, “You put the tape around the lever like so – stop it from winding down – you put the quarter in and –”

The bed begins to vibrate thunderously beneath them, and Richie grins salaciously over his shoulder.

“– bingo bongo, this bad boy’ll go all night if we want it to, and all thanks to George Washington and whoever invented scotch tape.”

“Richie, this is…” Eddie struggles to find the words. It’s objectively absurd – Richie in the crocheted briefs that show off damn near everything and a pair of unremarkable tube socks that make him look more sloppy than sexy; the bed, valiantly shaking beneath him with a deep, mechanical hum. It’s more than anyone’s ever done for him, sexually, and it’s such a clear _Richie-_ style declaration of want, of desire, that even if it’s kind of goofy, and not yet four o’clock in the afternoon, and even if Eddie’s more nauseated by the motion of the bed than he is aroused by it, he’s so struck with a sense of gratitude, filling him, warming him, that he thinks he’d do just about anything for Richie just about then.

“You’re terrific,” he says, and he can see, actually see, Richie leans into that praise, hungry for tenderness even more than he’s hungry for love. _You’re terrific and no one’s ever taken the time to really tell you – not the way I want to tell you. Not with their whole heart in it._

He rises from the bed, buoyed by a strange tidal wave of courage, and unbuttons his shirt slowly. Richie is transfixed, sitting on the bed, legs spread, cock hard and trapped behind white cotton yarn, a blush descending his neck and spreading over his chest almost to his nipples. He breathes open-mouthed as Eddie, drunk on the power he suddenly has to reduce another human being to its most base impulses, works open his thrifted belt and slides the cracked, worn-out leather out through his belt loops in one, languid movement. Richie whimpers – honest to God, whimpers – and his tongue darts out to wet his lower lip unconsciously, hands at his sides, balled up into fists. He’s shaking with the effort to stay still, not touching for fear he’ll interrupt whatever strange magic Eddie’s working on him now.

Eddie strips out of his slacks, then hesitates, fingers on the waistband of his briefs. It takes Richie an embarrassingly long time to find his voice, and when he speaks, he sounds like he’s gone without water for about a million years.

“You got a question, there, sugar?”

“I just… maybe don’t feel like having clothes on right now. It’s Texas – it is… kind of hot.”

Richie’s mind reels. _Oh, Christ. Is he – is he trying sexy talk? Little Eddie Spaghetti, trying to – and fuck, if it isn’t working._ Richie has never been prouder of him in his life.

“Gets cold ‘round these parts at night,” Richie ventures. “We may need to get… real close once sundown hits.”

It’s wishful thinking to think they’ll last thirty minutes at this rate, let alone the three plus hours it’ll take for the sun to set, but Richie knows that if he’s smart about it, if he paces himself, he’s got at least two rounds in him, and that’s without considering the arsenal of chemicals in the bus, some of which could keep the party going for a lot longer than that.

“I’m okay with getting close.”

“Well, then, you just be bare as you dare.”

Richie doesn’t bother trying to disguise his leering as he watches Eddie push his utilitarian briefs down his pale, narrow thighs, down, past bony knees, slender ankles, and –

“Even your feet are cute. I’m not even a foot guy, per say, but… man, every inch of you is just… top shelf.”

“Thank you,” Eddie says, preening a bit even as he blushes. He straightens up and stretches with a yawn.

“Lemme see your cock, man, just a peek.”

“It’s right here.”

“No – I mean, let me _look-look,_ let me ogle you, let me be a creepy old lech and paw at you – God, you’re driving me outta my mind! Hurry up and get over here, come on!”

Eddie lies down next to him on the bed and jumps a little as it hums.

“Oh – it feels… different. Lying on it.”

“Good different?”

Eddie wriggles a bit, getting comfortable. He notices the way the bed’s tremors are making his half-hard cock flop around and loses it, giggling in spite of himself.

“See? Once you get into it, the bed’s a hell of a lot of fun.”

“Alright, alright, what about you?”

“I’m a hell of a lot of fun too,” Richie grins and Eddie nudges him.

 _“Richie._ I want to see too… please?”

Richie lifts his hips a bit.

“Be my guest,” he grins, shutting his eyes and crossing his arms over his chest. “Go ahead and knock yourself out.”

He feels Eddie’s cool fingers trace around his belly a bit, then hook into his waistband and drag the offending fabric down and off, then feels his hard-on slap up against his abdomen, happy to no longer be constrained by its fabric prison.

“Wow,” Eddie breathes, finally. Richie cracks an eye open and just marvels at it, the two of them, side by side, naked and hard.

“Wow is right. You’d think after seeing one of these every day for my whole life, the novelty of seeing another one wouldn’t be that potent, but you’d be wrong.”

“It’s different when it’s not yours and you know they’re excited _for_ you. Gosh, your hair really is red, huh?”

“As a tomato,” Richie replies, then groans as he feels Eddie’s fingers settle on his upper thigh.

“You really keep it neat down there. All short – or is your hair just short like that naturally?”

“No, I trim. It’s hygienic. Not that I mind that you don’t – trim I mean. You’ve got such lovely red hair, you might as well show it off.”

 _He likes my bush,_ Richie thinks and it’s an absurd, happy little realization. _What a lucky man am I._

“Look how much I want you,” Richie rumbles, and the charm has the desired effect because Eddie sighs contentedly and clings to him, pressing a needy kiss to the corner of his mouth.

“I want you too – so much. I love you.”

And hell, Eddie is so damn gorgeous when he’s excited. He’s biting his lip, looking down at Richie’s cock, and his own, fingers twitching with want. “Can I touch you? Just… I’m curious. I’ve never held anyone else’s before.”

“Eds, my man, you don’t even have to ask.”

Richie watches as Eddie scoots closer, arranging it so that their cocks are parallel, or as close to parallel as they can comfortably be. Eddie’s is sort of leaning on him, trailing along the seam where Richie’s thigh meets the rest of him.

“You’re bigger than me,” Eddie admits, flushed.

“Yeah, but I’m also veiny and my balls are lopsided,” Richie fires back with a crooked grin. It’s easier to just get all the inadequacies out of the gate and laugh at them. In his experience, it makes it harder for partners to hold them against him later.

Eddie squints, looking down at him with the eye of an art appraiser.

“Maybe to some people. I think you look fine. I like your freckles.”  
He traces them with his fingers and Richie squirms.

“I didn’t ever think about it – if your cock would have freckles. But they’re perfect – you’re perfect. Not that I’ve got much experience, so I guess my opinion doesn’t matter much, but –”

“Your opinion is the only one that matters,” Richie interrupts. “If you’re happy, I’m happy.”

“What, just like that?”

“Just like that. I’ve decided. I am become an avatar of Eddie Kaspbrak’s sexual satisfaction.”

Eddie laughs at that, shaking his head in dismay.

“That’s a bit extreme.”

“It’s the truth! I am a new initiate in the sex cult of Eddie. As your humble servant, it is now my sacred duty to worship you.”

“You’re nuts,” Eddie protests, shuddering with sobbing giggles as Richie rolls them over and places ticklish, moustache-y kisses on his stomach, his neck, the insides of his elbows, his inner thighs.

“Oh, God – let me up a minute, Richie, I’m all sweaty from outside – it’s hot – let me clean up first, before you – Richie!”

Eddie makes a wounded noise as Richie takes one of his balls in his mouth.

“I like you sweaty,” Richie growls, feral with arousal, rubbing his cock against the vibrating mattress like an animal seeking relief. He grabs Eddie’s squirming thighs and pins them down. “I like you dirty and messy and sexy and all the ways you never get to be at home – when you’re with me you can be anything – you can do anything you want.”

“Richie –”

Eddie’s breath is coming hard and fast and he looks down with a mixture of alarm and arousal. It’s so intense – too intense – but Richie won’t stop talking unless Eddie asks him to, and Eddie – much as it shames him – doesn’t want him to, far from it. He’s loving this. He’s loving it so much.

“You like this, Eddie? You like being a big, rough man fucking around with another big, rough man?”

“I – yes,” he whispers, eyes wet and wide.

“You want to be in charge? You do, don’t you – you want to – fuck, pull my hair? Slap my face with your cock, maybe – maybe you wanna leave your cream all over my moustache, huh? Or fill my mouth up until it’s running down my chin and down my throat – do you want that, Eddie?”

He nods frantically, desperately, and there are honest, real tears on his cheeks.

“I’d love that,” Richie moans, kissing and mouthing at the base of Eddie’s cock. “I’d love that more than anything – you’d make me the happiest man in the whole world if you did.”

He shuffles forward, burying his face in Eddie’s lap, nuzzling, groaning, hands mauling the skin on Eddie’s hips.

“You like my nose, Eds? How’s it feel rubbing on your cock like this?”

He nuzzles harder for emphasis, feeling a bead of precum dribble down onto his face.

“You’re dripping on my eyebrows, Eddie – that make ‘em sexier to you?”

Eddie’s overwhelmed, but so is Richie because fuck – this feels like flying high on something wonderful, magical. Richie rubs the tip of his nose against the tip of Eddie’s leaking prick and presses a kiss to the underside of the shaft.  
“Richie, I’m so close, oh God –”

Richie pulls back, earning him a whine of discontent.

“Why’d you – why’d you stop?”

“‘cause I’m not done with you yet,” he replies, voice low and rough with his own arousal. Eddie grimaces, eyes screwing shut as his cock bobs involuntarily, the muscles in his lower abdomen clenching with need. Richie considers deep throating the length in front of him, and then reminds himself that he’s never done that before, and that he gags every time he has to use a thermometer to check his temperature, so there’s no way he could fit a whole penis in there. Necessity being the mother of invention – he is struck, suddenly, with inspiration.

“Roll over,” he commands. Eddie looks at him curiously, but he obeys, trusting Richie’s judgement in matters of the flesh.

Eddie’s ass is as cute as the rest of him, compact and pert, with dimples on either side of the base of his spine. _Like a cherub,_ Richie thinks through a haze of ambiguous yearning. He’s not sure if Eddie will like this and can’t remember how to articulate himself enough to explain it – he goes by feel, because he’s done this for women – with women – and he knows he’s good at it and maybe that’ll be enough to compensate for his subpar cock-sucking ability.

On his belly, Eddie’s got nothing but cheap hotel sheets between the vibrations of the _Magic Fingers_ and his erect prick. It’s different like this, really intense, the fibers of the textiles and the movement of the mattress creating a kind of burning friction that should be uncomfortable but isn’t. He feels hands on him, then, first on the back of his thighs and then higher, on his bottom, pulling in opposite directions, _spreading_ him – and he’s grateful he’s on his belly so he doesn’t have to meet Richie’s eyes. He’s so embarrassed he thinks he might faint, and so aroused he thinks he might die, and it’s a toss-up over which will happen first.

“… should work more or less the same,” he hears Richie murmur, and then there’s a _tongue_ on him, licking him where he has, up until that moment, never imagined he would or even could ever be licked – let alone that he’d _enjoy it,_ but enjoy it he does, despite how filthy it is, or maybe because of it. This act is the antithesis of every single warning he’s put up with all his life. Wear your rain boots, Eddie, keep a scarf on, Eddie, don’t eat hot dogs without boiling them first, Eddie, don’t walk in the tall grass, Eddie – the list falls apart, frays away in his mind, because he knows – knows without ever having been warned about it – that this is something he would never be ‘allowed’ to do. And what a shame that would be for past-Eddie – missing out on the way it feels to have Richie’s hot breath on his asshole, missing out on the way it feels to have someone else’s spit slide down his perineum and the back of his balls, missing out on – best of all – the broken way Richie groans against one of his cheeks, “God, Eds, you’re driving me wild, I want you, I need you, _I love you –”_

Well. _What a tragic loss that would have been for me,_ Eddie thinks in the dizzy, fragmented way of someone pushed to the very limits of their own capacity for pleasure.

Richie’s good at this – not that Eddie has any frame of reference – but he’s really going to town, going ten, twenty, thirty seconds without stopping to breathe. The hands on Eddie’s ass aren’t idle, either, kneading and squeezing in a way that’s… possessive, almost. Beneath them both, the bed rumbles on, purring like some big jungle cat. Eddie wonders if it’s possible to die from sex that’s just too good. It could happen – his heart could give out – he’s always had a weak heart compared to the average person. But then again, his heart feels fine – it’s pumping hard but it’s showing no signs of failure, not in the least. He looks, then, dares to take a peek over one shoulder, and sees Richie’s shock of hair and just… grabs it. It’s instinct, but he remembers, distantly, that Richie had said he was allowed to pull it, if he wanted. So he does. He pulls, hard, hard enough that Richie is yelling and reaching down between his own legs and – fuck – he’s gone over – Eddie _made him_ – that’s Eddie’s handiwork, that orgasm. It fills him with more pride than he knows what to do with. He lets go of Richie’s hair and Richie keens, flopping onto his side like a beached whale. There’s cum all over his belly and fist, all over the sheet.

“Turned the tables on me,” he wheezes, his face covered in sweat and spit, and flushed as red as his hair. “You play dirty, Kaspbrak.”

“I thought you _liked_ dirty.”

He says it without really meaning it to sound as lewd as it does, but Richie looks at him like he’s some kind of god, whimpering, and his neglected, softening cock gives one last twitch – an aftershock that Eddie feels as responsible for, as proud of.

“Come on me,” Richie begs hoarsely. “Don’t care where – my chest, my face, my cock, I don’t care but fuckin’ come on me. Please, darlin’, I need it. Please.”

Eddie shuffles forward, finding it hard to kneel on the vibrating mattress. It takes him a minute to find his proverbial footing. Once he settles, he reaches out and touches the semen cooling on Richie’s hairy stomach.

_Dirty._

He scoops some up and dabs it onto his own, aching prick. Richie lets out a sound almost like a sob.

“You’re magic,” he whispers, mostly to himself. “Magic, Eddie.”

* * *

_Your nerve-ends pulsating, now, now, now_   
_Our fingertips merge as one, love, love, love, love_

\- "Silly Sally" - Sweet Smoke

* * *

Eddie doesn’t reply. Instead, he focuses all his energy on hurtling towards that finish line. It doesn’t take much – he’s so hard that after four or maybe five pulls, he feels his balls draw up and his asshole tighten. Where to leave his mark – so many choices, and all of them in that moment seem appealing. Still, one stands out as special, different, more intimate, even. He aims his cock towards Richie’s face and Richie smiles serenely, shutting his eyes and letting his tongue loll out like a dog’s on a hot day. Eddie watches with a surreal sort of detachment as his ejaculate blooms forth from his urethra and falls in delicate ropes across Richie’s face – his beautiful nose, his moustache, his open mouth. Eddie makes no sound as he comes – a habit borne of his adolescence, where he lived in constant fear of being overheard and confronted by his mother. Because of his silence, she never once caught him, so he’s still not sure what fate would have awaited him if she had. Still, that fear is old – bone-deep. He’s had that fear since long before he ever hit puberty – fear she’d catch him slouching, catch him playing, catch him climbing a tree or petting a neighbour’s cat or chewing bubblegum or any number of other normal, human things. Part of him wishes, wistfully, that he had called out when he came, had had the courage to be loud when it counted, to let the universe know, in some small way, that he was grateful for this. Rather than dwell on the sense of loss, he loses himself in the feeling of running the head of his cock back and forth along Richie’s lower lip until it’s too much – until it almost hurts.

Only then does he make a sound – a soft sigh of contentment as he reaches over to the nightstand and pulls the tape off the lever, letting the meter on the bed run out. During the rest of its cycle, he lies on his back, just breathing, shoulder stuck to Richie’s shoulder, sweaty, messy, and fulfilled in a way he’s not been before. He wants to hold Richie’s hand, but the energy’s all gone out of him, so he just focuses on the sound of the other man’s breathing and tries to synchronize his own with it as he stares up at the light fixture on the ceiling.

“I love you to, you know,” Richie says quietly. “I tried to tell you – I mean, I did tell you – when you were… in the bus. With It. But then when you said it before I just – I got cold feet, I guess. I’ve not had the best track record with these things. The last three people I’ve said ‘I love you’ to all left me for somebody less… ‘Richie’ than I am. And I always thought – I’m not gonna change, not for anybody – but if you wanted me to – I mean, if ever you think I – I talk too much, or I’m too intense or I’m just not that funny – just – tell me, please. Give me a chance to change first. ‘cause I can’t lose you, Eddie. Not you. Not ever. It’d break my heart.”

Eddie shushes him gently.

“Don’t worry about that.”

“I know the mountain will probably kill us, but I just wanted you to know, is all.”

“I mean, don’t worry that I’ll want someone less ‘Richie’ than you. I could never. You’re… you’re so much of what I need and want. I can’t think of words, I’m too tired. I just. I love you, Richie, don’t be so hard on yourself, I love you.”

Eddie makes the gargantuan effort to role his head over and press a kiss to Richie’s earlobe.

“Don’t forget.”

It’s funny. Not funny-funny. More funny-sad. Neither of them have a leg to stand on where memory’s concerned. Still, Eddie means it, means it with his whole heart, and he’s sure, somehow, that Richie knows that, even before Richie – finally – finds his hand and squeezes it.

“I wanna kiss you so bad,” he confesses, “but I had my tongue in your ass and I don’t think you’d ever forgive me.”

Eddie laughs and gives their joined hands a little tug. In a while, they’ll peel themselves off the sheets and wash up in the tub and all will be well – at least for one night. But for now, they’re just happy to be just happy, together, too tired for more than the occasional chuckle and the press of fingers against fingers, an anchor-point between them on the bed.

* * *

_All your lightning waits inside you_   
_Travel it along your spine_   
_Seven stars receive your visit_   
_Seven seals remain divine_   
_Seven churches filled with spirit,_   
_Treasure from the angels' mine_   
_Slip inside this house as you pass by._

\- "Slip Inside This House" - 13th Floor Elevators


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Broke this chapter up because a) felt tonally right and b) wanted to get you guys an update. (This is a short, plot-heavy little interlude we need before we get to the good stuff.) Am tired/sleep schedule is fucked because of having to be the 'on-call guy' for family medical emergency - non-stop grocery runs, trips here and there to coordinate the acquisition of medical supplies etc. I've got a stress headache like I've never had in my life. So if I miss any typos, I'm sorry - I'll catch them later.
> 
> Also Mike's little 'historical' speech in this is almost entirely paraphrased from the Holy Mountain. I'll include the original quote in the end notes.
> 
> The downside of breaking this chapter up here as I have done is that, without the next bit, some of the plot point shifts may feel abrupt. They're not going to be - there will be context and exposition in the next bit - but if anything seems like it's being rushed I'm sorry. To anyone reading this AFTER the second part of this chapter is posted, you won't really need to heed this, as it should flow into itself pretty smoothly and just all work together as one. But I figured better to post something now just to let folks know I haven't abandoned it - life's just been busting my balls a lot.

* * *

_In this dark we call creation_   
_We can be and feel and know_   
_From an effort, comfort station_   
_That's surviving on the go_   
_There's infinite survival in_   
_The high baptismal glow._   
_Slip inside this house as you pass by._

\- "Slip Inside This House" - 13th Floor Elevators

* * *

SHORTLY AFTER BEN'S ARRIVAL IN EL PASO, TEXAS

* * *

After the cabs pull away, the silence begins eating at everyone. Even Ben, who has been breezy and carefree in the way that only a student on vacation can be since he arrived, seems tense.

“I still wish we could’ve brought my bus,” Richie grumbles, anxiety turning his stomach at the thought of it sitting in the hotel parking lot. “Anything could happen to it.”

“Could your bus even manage these rural roads?” Stan asks, absently rubbing his wife’s shoulder as she sits before him on their suitcase, fanning herself discontentedly with a regional map.

“It had no problem before,” Richie shrugs.

“The bus isn’t at issue,” Ben interjects. “It’s my rental car – well, and Stan’s station wagon. Neither of those could handle it, and we couldn’t all safely ride up with you.”

“I just… I hate leaving her behind,” Richie admits.

“You care more about personal property than I expected you would given your whole… lifestyle,” Stan confides and Richie snorts. His loaded quip is aborted when Bev pulls away from the group a bit and starts waving her arms up and down.

“That’s them!” she exclaims, “Has to be! We’re over here!”

“We’re the only group of five standing on the shoulder – I think we’re pretty hard to miss as it is,” Ben laughs, but the teasing is gentle. He’s been not-so-subtly making eyes at Bev since he arrived in El Paso, and Richie’s been not-so-subtly needling her about it ever since. So far, she’s been cool as a cucumber, giving nothing away, but Richie’s got a hunch that she doesn’t mind the young college man’s attention. He’s certainly a step up from the guys she used to run with.

The bus that slows to a stop before them is an actual bus – not a Volkswagen, not a camper – a bus-bus, like you’d see for a school or a church. Its white paint is tinged with rust at the edges, and it looks a little worse for wear, but not to the point of being unsafe. _Rugged,_ Richie thinks absently. _Rugged but road-ready._

When Mike steps out of the driver’s side, Richie does a double-take. He’d known – ever since Bill told him in a crackly phone call from the one roadside payphone that connects the mountain commune to civilization – that Mike had gone south, deep into the mountains, to prepare for the 'big reunion.' Commune living has clearly done wonders for him. He’s grown his hair out a bit from the military-style buzz cut he still wore the last time Richie had seen him, and he’s traded in his short-sleeved button-down and dull slacks for a loose-fitting linen number – sage green pants and a lavender shirt. He comes over and gives Richie a hug that Richie isn’t really expecting but doesn’t mind.

“You really did it,” he says with a grin that lights up his eyes. “I can’t believe it.”

“Just how little did you think my word was worth?” Richie scoffs. Mike laughs – it’s a warmer laugh than usual and Richie wonders just how much his friend has been changed by Bill’s particular brand of quiet mysticism.

“I didn’t mean it like that, man – it’s just… it’s crazy to see the gang back together again.”

Richie grabs the first of the suitcases and hoists it up the steps into the bus while Mike says his hellos, but stops when he realizes that he isn’t alone in the vehicle. There’s a person hunched over in one of the back seats, seemingly unconscious and wrapped in a blanket, face turned away.

Setting the suitcase down on an empty seat near the front, Richie exits the bus.

“Uh, Mike? Who’s the guy? You pick up a hitchhiker or something?”

“Oh, don’t worry about Henry – he’s pretty out of it, but he’s not gonna hurt anybody.”

“Henry?” Richie asks, but as he says it, realization catches up to him and he nearly drops Bev’s luggage in the dirt in shock. “Jesus Christ, _Henry_ Henry? Mike, what in the fuck –”

“What – what’s happening?” Ben asks, thrusting himself into the conversation, worry creasing his brow as he lugs his own baggage towards the bus doors.

“Mike has Henry Bowers in the goddamn bus,” Richie states, still staggered in disbelief. The rest of the group, upon hearing this, expresses various degrees of horror and disgust, all of which Mike bears solemnly, before speaking.

“I know this is upsetting to you,” he admits, “but Bill and I agreed that it’s necessary. Henry is as much a part of this whole cosmic... thing as we are.”

“But – think of how he was – what he did to us – to you!” Bev protests. Mike shakes his head.

“It took me a while to come to terms with this and I expect that it will for you too. But it may help you to know that that Henry’s long gone. They lobotomized him sometime in the last decade – he’s just a shell now. He can’t feed himself. Can hardly speak.”

“You pity him,” Eddie murmurs, so softly he's hardly audible. Mike nods.

“At this point? I do. He’s like a lion if you tore all its teeth out and blinded it. There is no humanity left.”

“So why bring him at all?” Richie roars. Everyone ignores him.

“How did he come to be here?” Ben presses. “Did whoever looks after him just hand him over to perfect strangers? That doesn’t seem likely.”

Again, Mike shakes his head.

“He’s been a vagrant for some time now. I keep in touch with some of the guys I was in the service with, and one of them had been homeless on and off since he was discharged. He’d gone through a charitable program and ultimately cleaned himself up enough to get back on his feet, and he wrote me to tell me about it. He said a guy he met at a shelter in Lewiston that had kept going on about Derry, Maine, and kept mentioning us. He heard my name, remembered I’d lived in Derry, and figured he’d ask if I knew the guy.”

“Another ‘coincidence’ then,” Eddie murmurs, grimacing. “It never stops feeling... creepy. Gosh, Mike, that’s a lot to take in.”

“I know it,” Mike replies. “That’s why Bill suggested we wait until we’re all together to talk about it. Bill’s been adamant there’s going to be nine of us going up that mountain, in addition to him leading the way.”

“Nine of us?” Ben echoes.

“The six of us – minus Bill, whose job it is to organize the whole thing – Henry, Audra, and Patricia.”

“That’s impossible,” Stan interrupts. “He had no way of knowing Patty was coming with me – we didn’t even decide until –”

“He knows,” Mike butts in, flatly. “He saw it in a dream.”

“Oh – in a dream. Okay, that makes sense – carry on, then,” Stan snaps, fear and frustration making his voice come out strained and rough. His wife grabs his hand and gives it a squeeze.

“Stan –”

“Patty, this is nuts! This whole thing is just – just nuts. Hell, we even have a bus with a psychiatric patient inside it just waiting for us –”

“Okay, so it’s nuts,” Patty agrees, “but don’t you think it’ll be easier to just get through whatever this process is, so that we can move on and go home? Otherwise, what was the point in coming all this way – spending all this time and money – just for us to say ‘to hell with it,’ turn around, and go back again?”

Mike nods vigorously in response to this.

“That’s the spirit. I’m serious – as long as you come to the base camp, your moral obligation here is fulfilled.”

Stan, cowed, loads his and his wife’s suitcases into the bus in silence. The silence grows – no one has the nerve to break it – and lasts until they’re all inside the vehicle. When at last someone does cleave through the tension, it’s Mike, voice carrying with all the authority of a man who – though he doesn’t advertise it – once rose to the rank of corporal and earned himself an Army Commendation Medal for his service.

“You know, if you look into it – I mean, if you just start scouring your local library for information about this,” he says as he drives the bus up unmarked, mountain roads, “you find examples of so-called ‘holy mountains’ popping up again and again. The Meru mountain of India, Mount Kunlun of the Taoists – the Karakoram of the Himalaya. It goes on… the mountain of the philosophers… the Rosicrucian mountain, the Cabalistic mountain of San Juan De La Cruz –”

Richie finds himself half-listening, half letting his mind wander. The history lesson is typical Mike, and not unwelcome, but Richie’s never had much of an attention span where these things are concerned. 

“There are stories like this, examples, from all over,” Mike continues nonchalantly, “but more or less they follow a similar pattern: nine Immortal beings live on top of the mountain – they hold the secret to the conquest of death. If you ascend, you come within reach of immortality.”

“And what, you think that holds true here in El Paso?” Ben asks – not judgemental, just intrigued. Mike adjusts his grip on the steering wheel.

“I think Bill thinks so. Right now, that’s enough for me, personally.”

The conversation continues, but Richie finds himself continually drawn to the inert lump that is Henry Bowers. His old tormentor – one he feared almost as much as It itself – now sits quietly, drooling on himself. It’s a hell of a thing, and it makes Richie ache for something – anything – to take the edge off.

“This is too weird for me,” Stan says, and there’s an edge of… not panic, but something like it, in his voice. “I do appreciate that this is something that means a lot to you, Mike – and to Bill – but I still don’t know that I want Patty and I hiking up some mountain just because of something Bill saw in a dream.”

“It wasn’t just Bill,” Eddie interjects suddenly. He’s been quiet for a while, even by his usual standards – shy and introverted ever since _that night_ in the honeymoon suite. He’s given every assurance to Richie that his reticence isn’t personal – that it’s just ‘an Eddie problem’ and not an ‘Eddie and Richie problem’ – but the unexpected lack of Eddie’s support in this next phase of the project has left Richie feeling disjointed and uncomfortable.

“Look, I appreciate that you don’t want to take drugs,” Eddie continues softly, “but there is something happening here that we all saw - except you. And that is your call, you can choose not to see it for yourself, but please, don’t try to tell us it didn’t happen. Six against one, Stan – you’re a numbers man. That’s an overwhelming percentage of us.”

“Out of a sample size of seven,” Stan retorts. He keeps going, and Ben joins in. The exchange doesn’t quite get heated, but it gets warmer than Richie has the stomach for. He tunes the whole conversation out – an attempt at self-preservation. He looks out the window at the mountainous terrain. It’s pretty – at least that’s something. Pale sky, dusty earth. Little tenacious desert plans clinging to the dry ground. Richie leans his face against the glass and lets his eyes un-focus, sliding over the blue and beige landscape.

_You may just die on this mountain._

It hits him unexpectedly, and somehow brutally, snatching the breath right out of his throat with an icy hand.

_You know it’s a possibility._

‘Yeah,’ Richie reasons with himself, ‘but Mike’s handling it. Bill’s handling it.’

_Bill’s Bill. And Mike… well, he’s a dead man walking, isn’t he? You all are, now – he’s just used to it._

Richie suddenly wants to be anywhere other than in this vehicle, but nowhere more than in the safe embrace of his VW on his back in the rugs and pillows, blowing clouds of smoke up to dance with the naked lady on the ceiling. He wants Eddie with him – wants to be all wrapped up together, huddled close. Leave the great cosmic evils to the rest of the world. It’s been so long he’s been searching, so long he’s felt… off-kilter. But now, with Eddie, that’s changing. It’s changing, but it’s new – still not quite set in stone. Eddie has been distant – mostly, Richie knows, because Richie’s been stressed out and short-tempered and Eddie’s smart enough not to want to deal with that – especially not if they’re all gonna die soon. Eddie is smart too - may be smart enough to know a sinking ship when he sees one, and right now? Right now Richie is taking on water, and fast.

Christ... how in the hell had it come to this? One minute, going for round two in the heart-shaped tub, Eddie moaning encouragement in his ear; the next, approaching death in an old bus with a lobotomized ghost from his past and a group of people who – sure – love each other, but can’t find enough in common among themselves anymore to really call each other friends -

_But that’s the point, isn’t it? On our own we’re all sad and broken, together we’re stronger, transcend your past and evolve into something better blah-blah-blah –_ but Richie isn’t Mike. He isn’t Bill. He’s wanted answers ever since he was a kid, ever since he recognized that mainstream American values with their pseudo-puritan morality and their narrow-mindedness were poisoning him sure as any snake bite or chemical weapon would. But now – now he’s facing the void, the loss of all those crutches he has, despite himself, gotten used to leaning on? He’s scared. Scared shitless. Scared like one of those shepherds in the Bible who saw God or angels or whatever – he can’t think straight, can’t remember. All he _can_ think about is that he’s mortal, and fragile, and insecure, and self-destructive, and all sorts of other undesirable and weakening things, and he’s marching right into the mouth of some awesome power that’s all teeth and bloodlust and vengeance.

_I’m gonna fucking die on this mountain. And I’ve been so fucking blind, I’ve led all my friends into the trap with me._

Well, shit. 

It’s futile to do anything with this realization. They’re too far into the meat grinder to reverse the process now. The parts of them that have been made into sausage will remain as sausage. You can’t unfuck what’s been fucked, etcetera. Richie lets out a low moan and presses his forehead harder against the glass.

“Hey.”

Bev’s voice is soft and unexpected. Richie looks over and finds that she’s taken the seat opposite him.

“Don’t mind them bickering,” she says. “I think they’re just a little shook up. Especially Stan. In terms of embracing counterculture, he’s kind of been forced to jump in at the deep end, here.”

“Yeah, I know,” Richie nods. “It’s not that. I’m just… shit, Bev, what if I fucked us all on this? What if I just signed the death warrants of some or all of us?”

“Richie,” Bev sighs, shaking her head, “we’re adults. You gave us information. You gave us a choice. It’d be pretty insulting to imply that none of that matters – that we’re all just pawns in some game.”

“Oh, don’t get me wrong, Bev, girl, I’m as much a pawn as you all are. Maybe more so. I’m the damned fool who opened this can of worms in the first place!”

He hisses it as loud as he dares, worried he’ll attract the attention of the others. They are mostly on the other end of the bus, and they are all still bitching at each other, but still. Richie doesn’t want to see them look at him the way Bev’s looking at him. All of them at once would probably make him die of shame.

“Richie… what we’re doing here? It’s like draining an abscess. I don’t know if Bill’s gonna get us to – to Heaven, or Nirvana, or enlightenment or _what._ Maybe we’ll all just spend some time dicking around in nature and living in tents. Would it be so bad if that’s all that happens? What matters is that we’re doing _something._ We’re looking at our lives – at how they were before – and we’re saying ‘no more.’ We’re taking the initiative to really change things. But it’s like getting fit if you’ve let yourself get out of shape. Like… like having a baby, even. The end goal is precious in part because of the pain you have to go through to get to it. What we’re doing up here? It’s a real transformation. Even if the end result is as bad as things were before, it’ll be a different kind of bad. Personally, I think that’s something to be grateful for.”

Richie thanks Bev with a grunt and goes back to looking at the window. He does appreciate it, though. He hopes she knows. She pats his shoulder, then leaves to return to the group. Inside, he feels like a bottle of pop someone shook real hard. Like if anyone even nudges the cap he’s got in place, keeping everything in, he’ll blow up.

Bev can say transformation is good because anything’s better than being beaten black and blue by some shithead. Mike can say transformation is good because anything’s better than being haunted by wartime ghosts everywhere he goes. Richie… sure, his life was shit, but it was a familiar kind of shit. A bearable shit.

_But you've always been a coward, haven’t you, Richie?_

He lets the vibrations of the glass against his forehead rattle his teeth and allows his mind to slip off on tangents. The sagebrush. Eddie’s hair. The tightness in his chest as he waits for death.

* * *

As the dead prey upon us,  
they are the dead in ourselves,  
awake, my sleeping ones, I cry out to you,  
disentangle the nets of being!

\- Charles Olson, _'As the Dead Prey Upon Us'_ (1956*)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “In old traditions they speak of holy mountains. The Meru mountain of India. Mount Kunlun of the Taoists. The Karakoram of the Himalaya. The mountain of the philosophers. The Rosicrucian mountain. The Cabalistic mountain of San Juan De La Cruz. There are many other holy mountains. The legend is always the same. Nine Immortal men live on top of the mountain. From the highest peak they direct our world. They hold the secret to the conquest of death.” This is the direct quote spoken by the Alchemist/Alejandro Jodorowsky in the Holy Mountain. I've just tweaked it/reworded it a bit.
> 
> Also the first poetry quote of this fic. Charles Olson was a reasonably big gun among the Black Mountain poets (I swear I didn't include him just because of the mountain imagery, but there's that Jungian synchronicity again lol) - he wrote some pretty interesting stuff and had some really cool takes on poetic meter and stuff. Worth looking up if you're into that kinda stuff. I put the year of publication down as a TENTATIVE 1956 as for some reason this has proved really hard to concretely find out. Everywhere just seems to say '1950s' but I've seen it cited once academically as 1956 (In Death in life: the past in ‘As the Dead Prey Upon Us’ in Contemporary Olson (Manchester University Press) in case you want to look into it more. Idk you do you.)
> 
> Also I unsurprisingly have yet again used fanfiction to plug the issue of homeless veterans. Suffices to say that Mike's friend is not the only one. Vietnam vets especially had a really high homelessness rate for multiple reasons, but the lack of support and unpopularity of the war were both factors.
> 
> Also it's feasible that Henry would've been lobotomized in the 60s. Lobotomies were still going on until the 70s. It's not necessarily LIKELY, and I debated electroconvulsive therapy instead, but for whatever reason, lobotomy felt like the way to go.
> 
> Also I swear it's not my intent to make Stan seem like the squarest guy in the universe. He will loosen up a bit. He's just (legitimately) freaked out by all this stuff. I actually really like Stan. But I feel like if we have an AU where he doesn't off himself, he'd have a lot of denial/avoidance/trauma to work on - arguably more than some of the others just due to his own skepticism/rationalism.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And all the feels were had that day.
> 
> If you want to listen along to the song I heavily sampled in this chapter, it's here. Though I changed the order of some of the lyrics a bit to fit:
> 
> "Dust" - 13th Floor Elevators  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkHyNTWNZkk
> 
> Trigger warning for canon typical fertility issues (Stan and Patty), period typical attitudes, and some random countercultural teen saying something tone-deaf unintentionally while in the throes of the black-and-white morality of youth.
> 
> Also I don't know why Ben being in a frat has become a headcanon here but I'm rolling with it.

* * *

_Dust from your skin_  
_Must trust, when it scatters_  
_Only love matters_  
_It's been overjoyed_  
_Scents and perfumes_  
_Whence, since your higher fragrance_  
_Is memory_  
_Incense and never destroyed_

_Every stop we've taken_  
_Is now a wonderous shrine_  
_Where nature is in order_  
_Your sense is sensing mine_

\- "Dust" - 13th Floor Elevators

* * *

Bill rises before the sun, and when Audra wakes, she finds that he has already commenced the preparations for the arrival of the anticipated eight – he has single-handedly set up four two-person tents, has the ground cleared of potential tinder that could catch while their campfire is lit, and has shaved his body clean of all its hair. Audra finds him carefully, ritualistically, folding long strips of raw silk into crudely-fashioned loin cloths. She squats in the dirt beside him, watching with passive interest. A passing insect flies towards his face and she fans it away with a swoop of her hand.

“You believe they are all coming?”

“I haven’t felt anything to suggest otherwise. You know Mike – he can lead when he needs to, and he’s a good judge of character. If anyone can manage their energies, he can.”

“I have faith in you, too, love,” Audra says warmly, and kisses her husband chastely on the forehead. “Where is the razor?”

“I left the shaving things by the spring,” Bill replies. “Would you like my help?”

“I have it in hand, Bill,” she smiles. “But as ever, I appreciate the support.”

They settle back into an amicable silence as Audra strips naked, walks to the spring – a small but tenacious trickle of ground water bubbling from a crack in the rock – and begins the process of shaving her head, underarms, legs, and mons pubis. Once the last of the shaving foam has been washed away, she returns to Bill and accepts a gunmetal grey length of silk which she weaves through her legs and around her waist. Bill’s own loincloth is white, bright white, and his scalp is almost equally pale. She had not realized how deeply he had tanned, but without his hair, the stark contrast is more visible.

“I will check on the broth,” she declares, and Bill mutters his thanks fondly. As she stirs the contents of the cast iron pot warming on the fire, she notices Bill stand out of the corner of her eye.

“They’re coming,” he intones, looking towards the dirt road. “They will be here within the next half hour.”

Audra smiles down at the contents in the pot. She is used to Bill’s observations, and the impossibility of them does not upset her. This had not always been so. She had been frightened, first, when Bill got the wild look in his eye that drove him to the hills. He had abandoned his possessions – abandoned his job, his life. He hadn’t abandoned her – hadn’t want to – but she had been inadvertently left at a crossroads. Go with Bill, leave things as they were behind. Stay with material things, with salary, security, reputation, alone. It had not been a hard choice, but it had been a significant one. More even than on her wedding day, she felt that she was pledging herself to some higher union, some sacred bond.

Audra had gone with Bill, into the hills, into the planes of existence that stretch beyond the physical, spatial dimension. Intimacy grew naturally, wild and hearty as a weed. As a consequence of this, she has found that she can no longer recognize the serene, open face on her husband’s shoulders any more than she can recognize herself when she peers in a looking glass. The woman she sees there seems, somehow, millennia older than the shallow-hearted girl who had crossed the pond full of dizzy daydreams. The America she’d aimed for, then, the America she’d hoped to become part of, was all flash and flamboyance – Hollywood, glamour, starlets, parties. What Bill had found – what Bill had led her to – was something ancient. Something older than America, the country, the colony, something older, even, than its pre-colonial history. Something pre-human, in the rock, in the very trees, the good earth, the four winds, the baking sun, the driving rain. Bill had led her to something eternal, something beautiful, and then he had stood aside and left her room to venture forwards on her own terms, in her own way. She had grown from girl to woman and now has become some kind of priestess of this primordial energy, all of her own volition, all of her own free will, and all with Bill’s blessing and support. Equal partners – like Sun and Moon. Parallel energies.

Bill is so different now, from that harried, frustrated author she had first loved, and yet the parts that she had cared for most then – the creativity, the kindness, the intelligence – are stronger now than they ever were. Purer.

In their hill-kingdom, in their wild sanctuary, they have created their own sacraments, found their own spiritual home. Bread and wine have been traded for psilocybin and mescaline. The trinity has been replaced with the elements of earth, sky, fire, and water. There are no gods, no trappings of organized religion. Nature itself is filled with sacred energy, and that energy vibrates in each of them.

Audra really believes this and has come to accept that the vibrations are stronger in Bill, or, perhaps, that he is more sensitive to them. She feels it when they meditate, and when they make love. He seems to have a sixth sense about him, something inexplicable and haunted. When he expressed his desire to set things right – and then, a week later, when Richie had appeared for the first time, talking about clowns and evil and offering Bill tabs to give him back the memories of his childhood – Audra had trusted that he knew what he was doing. She had panicked, for a moment – wavered – when he had tried to immolate himself. She now knows that he would not have burned even if she and Richie hadn’t stopped him. The fire would have simply put itself out. There is too much in Bill that is unresolved, too much left unfinished, for the universe to let him die. She is absolutely certain of this, and so, she feels nothing but a kind of quiet peace as the bus approaches their camp, old ghosts in tow.

* * *

_The trees in our gaze_  
_Will show us the love that we breath in_  
_This shouldn't amaze_  
_They openly love all they are_  
_And love's all they are_  
_Gifts, to begin_  
_Bliss, cliffs of expression_  
_They suit our impression_  
_And every whim._

\- "Dust" - 13th Floor Elevators

* * *

Ben was surprised to see Bev when he arrived at the hotel. She’d come down to greet him – the others had as well – Eddie, Richie, Stan and his wife. But Bev – Bev was – is different. Different from how Ben expected she would be – which is a funny thing to say, really, because he hadn’t expected she would be any way in particular. He hadn’t thought of her at all until Richie had bumped into him at that casino and reminded him. _These were your friends once, Ben. Don’t you remember? You loved this girl, once._

And that, to him, is the funniest thing of all.

Ben doesn’t get off on bragging about his conquests the way some men do, but he has certainly had a lot of them. College is like that – freedom, parties, people out from under their parents’ thumbs for the first time. It’s ubiquitous, even more so when, like Ben, you enter your post-secondary school life in good shape, with better than average social graces. Ben’s good looking, smart, funny – he can talk his way into women’s beds easily (or, more often, talk them into spending a night or two at the frat house with him.) They like him, too. He’s passionate enough, certainly interested, but never degrading. He treats each girl he sleeps with as an individual, worthy of respect and attention. As such, he gains a reputation for being safe, and the girls come willingly. Then they go to bed with him, and come often, in both senses of the word.

“How do you do it?” his fraternity brothers often press. “How do you get them fawning all over you like that?”

Whenever he’s put on the spot by this, Ben just smiles and jokes it’s something you’re born with. It isn’t. It’s something he has learned meticulously over his entire life – and really, the plentiful tail is just a side-effect of a larger personality shift. Ben gravitates towards understanding people – or trying to as best he can. It’s what makes him stand out as an architect. His professors, enamoured, call him ‘intuitive’ and say he has an ‘affinity for the needs of the common man.’ Ben isn’t sure about that anymore than he’s sure that he’s unlocked the secret to wooing women. He just treats people like they’re people. Anyone who’d need that explained to them, he admits privately when it crosses his mind, probably couldn’t learn it if they had a gun to their head. Maybe, in that way, he is different.

One of the many girls he has on rotation, a knock-out brunette with big tits and legs that go on forever, asked him why he doesn’t just settle on a girl.

“You’re clearly not just in it for sex,” she’d said, and when he denied this, she insisted.

“Ben – you know I’m right. You’re different from other men. You’re looking for something – for someone. I’m not saying she has to be me. I’m engaged anyway – you know – my boyfriend’s in the Navy –”

“I did know that, yes.” He hadn’t. “Have you heard from him lately? Is he okay?”

She could tell he was deflecting, dodging, and she let him win.

Truth be told, it’s not that she’s wrong – it’s that she’s missing a puzzle piece. What Ben does to his parade of women is much more like making love than it is just fucking for fun. Half the time, he doesn’t even bother fucking them – he’s happy enough to just kneel at the foot of his bed and work them over with his mouth for two, three, maybe four orgasms. Happy isn’t really the word, though – fulfilled, maybe. When he’s ensuring that the woman he’s with is having the best sex of her life, he can feel, momentarily, better about the fact that he’s using her.

No – not in the way women are usually used by men. Not in the way his frat brothers use women and throw them away like yesterday’s newspaper the minute something better comes along. In a different way – a profound, uncomfortable, personal kind of way. Ben uses women in that, when he is with one or – on rarer occasions – two, or even three – he doesn’t feel like Ben Hanscom at all. He just feels like a stand-in – some embodiment of maleness. He watches the faces of his lovers and, invariably, they all close their eyes, or look away. Sometimes they call out their fiancé’s name, or their ex-boyfriend’s, or their husband’s. They never call his name – and he likes it like that. He likes that he can, for an evening, be nothing more than a placeholder.

Ben, in a soft, almost shy way, deeply hates his life – loathes it – and he has no idea why, or what to do about it. Only that, as he ages, he feels somehow worse – like there’s some impending danger lurking ahead of him. He parties – keeps the frat house stocked with beer – gives free rides to his friends, free moustache rides to their girlfriends. The few times he’s slept with a friend’s girlfriend, they haven’t even been mad. It’s as though it’s a universally accepted truth that Ben is, really, more a glorified dildo than a man. He’d actually fucked his roommate’s fiancée once when his roommate had gone to an away game with the varsity football team. He’d left her panties out where they would be found, hoping, praying for _something._ Maybe he’d get hit in the face. Maybe he’d get his tires slashed. Maybe – maybe nothing. His roommate had shaken his hand – shaken his _hand_ – and said:

“Thanks for making sure she didn’t get too lonesome.”

Ben had hated his life a little more, after that, but, like anyone caught up in indecision, he kept doing what he was doing out of a fear of the unknown. He partied, kept up friendships, went out with (and home with) beautiful women.

“You must be the luckiest guy in the world,” another frat brother had said shortly before he’d left for Texas. “If you weren’t so damned likeable, I’d been green with envy, but it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”

Ben supposes having everyone think you’re nice, when you are, in fact, using them to plug up a void in your heart, isn’t the worst thing that could happen in one’s life. Really, he doesn’t have the right to complain – not when compared to what some people have to go through. Still, when he saw Bev, in that first moment, coming out of the hotel with her hair loose, in a peasant dress and sandals, he felt something – _something_ – after a lifetime of feeling nothing at all – because, in that moment, he hadn’t just been seeing Bev. She had been seeing him too.

Since then, she’s kept doing it – just looking over when he starts losing himself – as if she knows he feels like he’s… unspooling. Unwound. In the bus, with tempers flaring and anxiety at an all-time high, he catches her eye just as the sun hits her hair and lights it up like it had when they were both children and he had first noticed her – beautiful in the way a tree is beautiful, not just for the fragility of its outermost branches, but for the way it bears the weight of the sky on its back.

 _It’ll be alright,_ he thinks, mellowing. _Lord knows how, but it will. It’s gotta be._

Across the aisle, he finds himself grinning, but she’s already gone – off to help poor Richie, who looks rough all on his own. He isn’t jealous in the least, but he misses the warmth of her energy brushing up on his. When she rises from soothing her friend, he finds himself scooting over, making room. He doesn’t know if she’ll take the seat – he can’t find his voice to ask – but he hopes she will.

He really hopes she will.

* * *

_The faith that we build_  
_Will strengthen our close growing closer_  
_Till waiting is filled_  
_We simply remember we are,_  
_Where ever we are._  
_Clay that we print_  
_May stay as we mold it_  
_But will never hold it_  
_The promise is long_  
_Till we're complete_  
_Will, still is intention_  
_We still need attention to help us along._

\- "Dust" - 13th Floor Elevators

* * *

  
After some squabbling, the group settles down. On some level, Stan supposes they have to. What’s the alternative – vaulting from a moving vehicle in protest? Still, he feels prickly, like he’s got his shoes on the wrong feet. He actually goes as far as to look down and check – but no, his left shoe is on his left foot, and his right shoe is on his right foot, and neither of them are really mountaineering attire but he’s not an outdoorsman and couldn’t find anything he liked for a fair price at the store they’d stopped at to get Patty’s sunhat.

Patty. He glances surreptitiously over at her and sees that she’s pulled a crossword out of her handbag. He both loves and hates how easily she’s able to dissociate from all this. She shouldn’t know about it – shouldn’t be affected. These two chapters of his life were never meant to meet. He wrings his hands, agitated. She shouldn’t be here. She should be in Georgia, safe, sound, sane – away from the madness of this – this fool’s errand on a mountain.

_What the hell am I doing here? I’m not a kid anymore – none of us are. So Bill’s eaten a mushroom and wants to go fight nightmares – so let him. Doesn’t mean we all need to get ourselves killed._

Stan wishes – not for the first time – that he’d already gotten Patty pregnant. He wishes she was at home in Atlanta, happily bouncing a baby on her knee. Maybe if he died on this mistake of a trip, she’d be able to get over it, if she’d had a baby to look after. But there is no baby – just pain and unspoken hurt and grief Stan can’t find an outlet for because people don’t _talk_ about these things. They just don’t. Maybe – maybe in communes, where everyone’s having everyone’s kids and giving them names like Rainbow and Icicle, maybe there but not in the circles he runs in. He just gets The Look – the same, awkward, pitying look – from everybody. Patty gets it too, often worse. Society often blames the mother-to-be where these things are concerned. Sometimes, when they go to the supermarket or the department store and run into someone they know, they _both_ get it, simultaneously.

That’s worse than any half-remembered nightmare ever could be. That’s the real, grown-up problems that adults deal with. Sometimes Stan’s blindsided by how good, old-fashioned common sense seems to have flown the coop. He’ll be on his way to work, or the bank, or the post-office, and he’ll see some headline, some picture, some students somewhere yelling about abstractions. Once, he’d been coming back from a doctor’s appointment with Patty – The Look still eating at him like a swarm of biting flies – and some snot-nosed, long-haired kid stopped to take the silver spoon out of its mouth and say to his equally snot-nosed comrade: “If you step out of your house wearing a suit and tie in this day and age, you might as well just wear a sign on your back that says ‘I’m a jingoistic white supremacist.’ It’s obvious whose boots you’re licking.”

Stan had, overwhelmingly, been struck with an urge to hit him. He hadn’t of course – he was an adult, the brat was, at most, sixteen, and more importantly, he wasn’t the kind of man who solved his problems with violence (any more than he was the kind of man who broke his promises to old friends, more’s the pity.) Besides that, Patty was on his arm, face clouded, in her own private hell, oblivious to the world in the wake of yet another round of bad news from the fertility specialist. But the anger he felt bubbling, Stan had realized then, was yet another untalked-of thing, lurking under the surface of the still waters of his mind.

All the way home, he’d fantasized about grabbing the kid by his stupid t-shirt and shaking him, screaming an inch away from his face. _How dare you act like you know me – how dare you assume I don’t know or care or worry about imperialism or war crimes or genocide - like I haven't got **a pretty damned good idea** about just how nasty human beings can be at their most hateful - just because I don’t have the luxury of quitting my job to go to some fucking sit-in – how dare you look at me and think I’m some racist WASP with my head up my ass – how dare you act like you have any idea what it’s like to button your shirt and comb your hair and shave and drive to work and meet your deadlines and come home and see that your wife’s been crying and lie beside her in the dark, knowing there’s nothing – nothing – that’ll come along and make things easier for her, so you’ve got to keep the house of cards standing even if it kills you –_

But there would be no point to saying any of that, no point in wasting so many words rebutting a passing comment by a stranger. There would be no purpose at all in trying to change such a small mind, and anyhow, there’s laundry that needs doing, and the eaves-troughs want cleaning out, and it’s a work day tomorrow, so Stan can’t afford to fritter away his time or his energy on pointless ventures.

_And what the hell is all this, if not the most pointless of all ventures?_

Stan’s chest is burning. He’s anxious, which is giving him heartburn, and right now he’d give his eye teeth for an antacid and maybe just twenty minutes of peace to watch the nightly news or – hell, to help Patty with her crossword, even. He feels the way he thinks a popcorn kernel must feel, splitting along its hidden seams, heated to the point of rapid expansion.

_You can’t afford to worry about that. Keep it together._

He looks over again at Patty, head down, eyes fixed on the word game in front of her, and he feels the sort of dizzy, lurching pain-love he feels every time he sees her face fall when the doctors give them bad news, or when her period comes and dashes whatever hopes they had of a miracle.

Not that Stan’s ever been a believer in miracles.

The feeling of falling – falling in love? It’s not falling in love. It’s love _as falling_ – an endless, brutal drop as he plummets to some unseen pit of snakes or spikes below. When it hits, it’ll kill him – he’s always known that in an abstract way, never so real as he knows it now. But no time to worry about the impact when Patty’s here – when _you brought her here, Stan, you put her in the line of fire yourself._

He forces himself to focus on the surface of the water – calm – unmoving – in his mind. Never mind what lurks beneath – it’ll be there later, when the shit finally hits the fan. He forces himself to breathe. He forces himself to school his facial expression into something neutral, to look over, to say something inoffensive.

“Fourteen down is ‘galliform.’”

And Patty’s faint echo of a smile as she follows his lead, buries her own hurts, says “you always get the bird ones,” is a life raft. In the confines and privacy of his head, he clings.

* * *

_Taste has got thirst_  
_Faced, waste_  
_Beyond uses,_  
_With so many juices_  
_Were filled to the brim_  
_Our pleasure's not forsaken_  
_We cultivate our bend_  
_More chances re-awaken when beginning meets the end_

\- "Dust" - 13th Floor Elevators

* * *

Bill meets them at the trailhead when the bus pulls to a stop. Richie needs a moment to take in his whole vibe – a white shawl-like thing draped over his head and shoulders. Some kind of crude toga. A loincloth. He’s also bald now, for some reason. It’s all a bit much, but somehow, on Bill, it doesn’t seem as weird as it actually would be on anyone else.

“Nice get-up,” Richie says brightly. “We won’t lose you at a distance. That’s smart.”

“I’m glad you’re here,” Bill answers, smiling. “I’m glad you’re all here. Come – get your luggage and follow me up the trail. Camp is only a short walk from here.”

The group unpacks the bus and follows, obedient as ducklings, all in a row. Bill first, leading the way, is followed by Ben, then Bev, then Stan and Patty. Eddie and Richie trail behind them, with Mike, pushing Henry in a folding wheelchair, bringing up the rear.

Even going slowly, Mike begins to outpace Richie, who’s in turn is matching Eddie stride-for-stride.

“I didn’t realize Bill’d be so far up,” Richie remarks. “The rest of his commune were so near ground-level.”

“Bill’s on a different path now,” Mike says neutrally. “Hey, can you walk faster? I keep having to curb my stride, here, and it’s not easy what with the chair.”

“Go on ahead of me,” Richie insists. “I'll keep an eye on Spaghetti man. We won’t get lost. We’ll stay close to you at all times.”

Mike hesitates, but only for as long as it takes for the weight of the wheelchair to backslide into him. He nods his thanks and Richie steps aside to let him pass.

“Alone at last,” Richie says, and notices Eddie flinch in his peripheral vision.

“Richie… I don’t – I don’t want to talk about things right now.”

“You haven’t wanted to talk since the hotel.”

Eddie looks stricken, pained, so Richie fills the silence for him, bridging the gap with words.

“I know I’ve been kind of a prick –”

“You haven’t been a prick, Richie, you’ve been nervous, which is understandable.”

This is a startling revelation.

“You’re not mad at me?”

Eddie sighs.

“Richie, I already said I wasn’t mad at you. I told you – I’ve got my own shit to deal with.”

“Well… do you want to talk about –”

“No!” Eddie snaps, eyes wide and brow pinched with frustration. “No, because you’ll make it about you when it isn’t! I love you but you’ve got a chip the size of New Mexico on your shoulder and I don’t have it in me to deal with that right now!”

Richie shuts his mouth. He feels something tight and ugly sting the back of his throat, his eyes, the inside of his nose. He turns away.

“That… uh. Makes sense. Sorry. I won’t – won’t bring it up again.”

He shoves his hands in his pockets and moves to walk, head down, up the mountain.

“I’m sorry, Richie… wait. Come here.”

He is a little embarrassed by how quickly he reels in place and scampers to Eddie’s heel like an overgrown puppy.

“I just. It just hit me this morning that if I die today, or tomorrow, or anytime while we’re out here, my mom will be left alone for the rest of her life. It was one thing when I thought I'd eventually go back - not to stay, but to - to make sure she at least has her needs met. I owe her that much - she is my family as much as she is... difficult.”

Richie nearly retorts with his usual opinion of Sonia Kaspbrak, but falters. A rare, noble instinct guides him to keep that comment inside. Richie’s not usually so blessed. He takes the magic moment of grace to think of what he _should_ say.

“She won’t be alone, Eds.”

It surprises him as much as it surprises Eddie, who very nearly trips on the unpaved path, he’s so startled.

“Richie,” he murmurs, “you hate her.”

“Yeah, well. I hate going to the dentist too. Sometimes you put up with what you hate for the greater good.”

Eddie’s face twists and for a moment, Richie’s terrified that he _did_ say the wrong thing after all, but then he’s being pulled into a tight hug.

“I’m more scared something’ll happen to you than to me,” Eddie admits. Richie laughs wetly, sniffing – _don’t cry, damn it, that’s just pathetic._

“Now who’s the one with low self-esteem, huh?”

He buries his nose in Eddie’s hair.

“You gotta be okay, Eds. Whatever It wants with us, however dirty It fights, you gotta stick around.”

“Right back at you,” Eddie nods, then, glancing up the trail briefly, chances a quick kiss on the lips. Richie spots a little patch of yellow flowers growing next to the trail and picks one, sticking it behind Eddie’s left ear.

“You’re so cute, man, it’s unbelievable sometimes, it really is.”

Eddie smiles, cheeks reddening a little.

“Come on,” he insists. “It’ll do us no good, falling behind from the group.”

But there’s a smile on his lips now – a small one, just for Richie. It makes him feel like the luckiest man – if not in the world, (given the whole ‘impending doom’ thing,) then at least the luckiest on the mountain.

* * *

_As I love you_  
_All the creatures play_  
_As I love you,_  
_Now it's safe to say_  
_There's no hang up in our way_

\- "Dust" - 13th Floor Elevators

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was really fun to write. Lots of points of view was challenging, but fun.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welp, I may break the next chapter up further, but this felt like it should stand alone - a small interlude. My laptop broke today - thankfully I could save my files - just the screen is broken but I was able to run it though my TV and pull the files from there - long story. ANYWAY the point is I had already written most of this part - finished it- then decided it stands alone well enough to be posted as is. The next chapter will be either very big or put into smaller parts. Also I should be getting my replacement laptop tomorrow (this one has been dying for a long time so I prepared for this - still caught me off guard though.) So hopefully all will be well in the end and the update schedule shouldn't be too affected.
> 
> And another very on-the-nose song choice. Oh well, I am sad, I am drunk, and I am having a really shit day. I am not above this anymore than I am above making Richie hum In-a-Gadda-da-Vida, because damn it, he would.
> 
> Journey to the Center of the Mind (1968:)   
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_onagRhKN5E

* * *

Eddie isn’t sure what he’s expecting to find at Bill’s mountain camp, but it isn’t chili. It’s beanless – Texas style – and hot – and after a day of fretting and riding around on bumpy roads, Eddie’s happy enough to just eat quietly, letting the lull of everyone else’s conversation blanket his senses. They’re all sitting on the ground, a perfect circle around the fire. A loaf of bread is passed from hand to hand. When it gets to Eddie, he tears some off and chews it slowly. It’s heavy – full of seeds, coarse. The nourishment sits like a stone in his stomach.

He does feel a fraction better for having talked things out with Richie. He’d been surprised at the other man’s maturity, but then, Richie’s never been unkind, even when he’s been oblivious. He’s just distractible, hyperactive, and prone to covering his nerves with bravado. Never unkind.

_He offered to look in on Ma._

The thought makes Eddie blush a little. That’s something like serious couples do – checking on the in-laws.

_He’d do that for me._

And

_I love him._

And

_I’m scared for him._

Eddie knows there are not enough tents. He knows he will have to buddy up with someone, and he knows that someone will be Richie. He knows that once it’s the two of them in the dark, side by side, he will want to make love, will want to cry, will want to barricade them both in the tent and never leave it.

He mustn’t do any of these things.

For one thing, the tent walls are too thin to offer them any privacy. For another, Eddie has this sense that it would be inappropriate in some way – like masturbating in a church.

Avoiding the inevitable, Eddie offers to wash the dishes, then to check on the fire, then just lingers, waiting, until everyone has gone to bed. It’s probably not safe to be awake on his own, let alone to wander, but he finds he doesn’t care as much as he probably should. If they’re fucked enough to be picked off one by one, at this stage, they’re fucked enough that a little nylon tent won’t save them.

At least, that’s his rationale as he weaves his way down the trail to the bus. He’d swiped Richie’s stash from his suitcase and it weighs heavy in his pocket. The night air is cold but breezeless. Lucky thing, too, or he’d have had to fight it to keep hold of Richie’s rolling papers.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow they… die? Fight? Life to tell the tale? All Eddie knows – all he’d been able to parse from Bill’s esoteric ramblings – is that tomorrow, they’re all going to drink some… tea, broth, brew thing that Audra’s been cooking for the better part of three days. Then they are, probably, going to trip and trip hard, and somewhere in their minds, in the unconscious, they’ll find It.

_It’ll be a piece of cake,_ he thinks bitterly. _A real easy fix._

Eddie is still standing there, smoking and stewing, lone witness to the dark, when he hears Richie’s distinct, if somewhat out-of-tune, voice ringing out in the night. An absent-minded, quiet acapella rendition of ‘In-a-Gadda-da-Vida’ brings a smile to Eddie’s face in spite of the grim mood he’s in. He hums a bar or two of harmony and hears Richie’s footsteps come to a stop.

“Oh, hey, Spaghetti – I didn’t know you were out here. I was gonna smoke, but my stuff wasn’t in my –”

He stops when he sees the joint Eddie’s holding and snorts.

“You little thief. Let me have a puff, come on.”

Richie takes a deep pull, then looks at it contemplatively.

“When’d you start rolling better joints than me?”

“It’s not like you set the bar very high,” Eddie teases. “You always overfill them.”

“I’m a maximalist.”

Eddie plucks the joint from his fingers and takes a drag himself. He smiles fondly.

“I know.”

Richie whistles and rubs his hands together, a bundle of nervous energy.

“Hell of a night, huh? Hell of a pickle we’re in.”

“Hell is right.”

“Ben seems to think we’ll get through it just fine. I overheard him say so to Bev.”

“Maybe we will. Nothing inherently wrong with optimism, is there?”

“You say that like we both aren’t miserable cynics.”

“Well,” Eddie sighs, handing Richie the joint again and pushing off from where he’s been leaning against the side of the bus, “with a bit of luck, we’ll get to grow old and miserable together.”

Richie’s eyes light up at this.

“We can yell at all the neighborhood kids to stay off our lawn!”

“Mm, and complain that the teenagers play their music too loud.”

“God, that sounds…” Richie shakes his head. “That sounds terrific.”

Eddie doesn’t know what to reply, so he turns back towards the horizon, the looming blackness, the deep void.

“You wanna fool around?” Richie asks, and Eddie can’t help but laugh at that.

“God, what are you, sixteen? You’re such a menace.”

“Look me in the eye and tell me you haven’t thought about it once today. Ha – can’t can you? Under that pristine veneer you’re as much of a sex maniac as I am.”

Eddie shakes his head.

“I don’t want to come on this mountain. I feel like being pent up, if anything, will give me an edge – not that you can call it pent up given how recently we –”

“I just – I can’t keep my mind off it, you know. The likelihood we’ll die. Or go crazy. Or go crazy and die.”

Richie says it with no expectations – just a quiet confession between friends. Eddie considers his options.

“Want me to give you head?”

Richie nearly drops the joint – there’s a precarious second where it threatens to fall away down the mountain, into the abyss.

“You can’t just look at me like that and say these things,” he protests. “It’s criminal. You’ll kill me.”

“Yeah, well. It’s a time sensitive offer – we wait too long and It will do the killing for us,” Eddie counters.

“Okay,” Richie concedes, “okay, then.”

What follows are ten minutes of frustrated and futile foreplay. It amounts to precisely nothing. Richie slams his hand, open-palmed, against the side of the bus in irritation.

“God damn it, Eddie, get up. This is pointless. I couldn’t stay hard right now for a million dollars. I keep feeling like the world’s getting ready to cave in under me.”

“It’s okay,” Eddie insists, dusting off his knees. “Really.”

Richie snorts in disgust.

“Right. What’s one more indignity in the face of… a fucking unknowable abomination – God, Eddie, I don’t know what I was expecting Bill to do for us, but I’ll admit, I’d hoped he’d have more of a plan than whatever the fuck he’s having us drink tomorrow.”

“You’re too tense. Less talking, more smoking. It’ll help.”

“Maybe,” Richie sighs, “or maybe it’s like trying to fix a decapitation with a band-aid.”

“Okay, fine,” Eddie admits. “Maybe you’re right. _So what then?_ Worst case scenario is what? – Go.”

“We all die,” Richie says flatly. Eddie nods.

“Then we won’t give a shit what happens because we’ll be dead. Next worst is what?”

Richie flounders.

“We all go irreversibly crazy.”

“Okay, well, see argument A. Even if we’re aware enough to be upset, we won’t really know why, and maybe won’t even know who _we_ are anymore. So… de facto death. Next worst?”

“Eddie, what is this? Some kind of morbid 20 Questions?”

“It’s something I used to do as a kid sometimes, to calm myself down. You know my mother would always be… building fears up, you might say. So I would do this at night to help… scale them back a bit. Otherwise, I’d never get any sleep.”

Richie stares at him, his mouth a down-turned line. Eddie elaborates.

“Like… okay – going outside without a scarf will kill me – so says Ma. Second to worst case scenario – she’s right. I’m dead, I don’t care. Worst case scenario – I get real sick and have to lay in bed for a month while she tells me it’s my fault for not listening to her in the first place. Solution? Don’t get sick, or, if I do get sick, make sure it’s bad enough either to hospitalize or, ideally, kill me. After that I could usually nod off to sleep in ten minutes or so.”

Richie nods minutely.

“Eds, that’s both brilliant and really, profoundly fucking heartbreaking.”

“Derry in a nutshell.”

“Mm.”

Richie thinks long and hard about the state of things.

“Worst case scenario, redux: everyone dies but me.”

Eddie swallows at that, understanding lining his face.

“Solution?” he whispers, almost fearful, but facing it - resolute.

“I go back to the hotel, get my handgun, and put a bullet right here.”

Richie taps his temple.

Eddie nods.

“Richie, if you die and – and I live… could I – I mean, would you mind if I… borrowed your… handgun?”

Richie’s eyes go steely.

“You don’t deserve a coward’s way out, Eddie, you deserve –”

“To rot away in a house with Ma? I’d just as soon not. Anyway, it’s not a coward’s way out. It’s just… a fail-safe. Dignity.”

Richie leans in and kisses Eddie long and hard. He pulls back after his lungs start to burn and takes in Eddie’s wet eyes, kiss-swollen lips.

“Dignity,” he nods. “May it never come to that.”

* * *

_Come along if you care_   
_Come along if you dare_   
_Take a ride to the land inside of your mind_

_But please realize_   
_You'll probably be surprised_   
_For it's the land unknown to man_   
_Where fantasy is fact_   
_So if you can, please understand_   
_You might not come back_

\- "Journey to the Center of the Mind" - The Amboy Dukes


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Annoying thing about typing on a new laptop - I just deleted my author's note by mistake. So here's something close to what I wanted to say, but likely less good:
> 
> For those listening along: Bulbous Creation's 'End of the Page' (1971)
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehwRu_Q7qzw
> 
> Chapters have been restructured going forward so this thing should take 2, maybe 3 more if I include an epilogue.
> 
> Most of Bill's dialogue is borrowed from the Holy Mountain, though I've tweaked it to make it fit. Also he's considerably less informed than the Alchemist in tHM, so he's much more surprised by the results of his own handiwork.
> 
> Also don't ask me what mushroom he's got up his sleeve. We've established by now these are all strains that exist as plot devices. At this point, you can assume most of the drugs in here are being used for narrative effect more than realism. Which, honestly, I am of two minds about, but I only realized how much I'm of two minds about it after I got to like... 3 chapters ago. Still don't know how I feel about it, but it's too late to worry about it. So I'm going with 'this is basically magical realism or something at this point so we can all play fast and loose with whatever we have to to make all the ducks line up in a row.'
> 
> Also for you non-yoga people, Bitilasana is the 'cow' part of a 'cat-cow' pose, i.e. the one where your spine/back is curved down like this ︶
> 
> Also I'll put the original script text from tHM in the endnotes for people who want to see that.
> 
> Edit: Oh also, I realized that for non-tHM fans, you may not know that in the burning money scene, they also burn big wax replicas of themselves. So that might be worth knowing before you get to the 'effigy' line in this chapter. Consider yourself informed. Also, as to why a bird and not a dog (this'll explain itself later) uh... tbh I couldn't figure out how to put a dog up a mountain in El Paso. I figured a bird'd stand a better chance. But yeah honestly just go with it. Or don't. But don't worry too much about why a bird and not a dog.

* * *

_Take my hand and make a stand against this life of death_   
_Tell the people, make their choice while they still have on left_   
_Do you want to die, before your children reach the age?_   
_Or are the words you said today the ending of the page?_

– “End of the Page” - Bulbous Creation

* * *

The first task which Bill Denbrough sets before the nine is to wash, purifying their bodies for the journey forwards. This is accomplished at the spring, at staggered times, that the shy might have some privacy. Of course, there will be a time when intimacies would flow as freely as breathing, as water from the spring, but for now, Bill is patient and makes allowances as needed.

The loincloths come next. Audra had suggested an extra piece of silk for the girls – in case they lacked her comfort with nudity. In the end, only Patty opts to wear it. Bev’s hair is long enough to shield her, anyhow.

Bill stands, bald head gleaming in the light of the morning, looking half John Lennon with his round lenses, half monk in his draped fabric, and addresses the crowd, who remain seated on the ground in a semi circle around him in varying degrees of discomfort, their discarded clothes bundled in their arms. Mike, resolute, stoic. Stan, visibly uneasy, fidgeting with the sash on the loincloth. Eddie, shivering. All eyes, however, are on Bill, waiting for him to lead them, to guide them. When he is sure everyone is receptive and ready, he begins to speak.

“In my reading – and Mike’s – mountain imagery has been a constant. It has become clear to me that the antithesis of It is at the peak of this mountain – this holy mountain. To understand why, you have to understand the message, the myth, of such a mountain. In an archival document that Mike found, there was a report from a rogue prospector – he was convinced that this mountain – the one we stand on today – was _the_ holy mountain. The place where Man can learn to conquer Death.”

He takes a breath, waits. Keeps one eye on Stan, who he expects will be hardest to convince.

“At the top of this mountain – if our prospector is to be believed – there are nine immortal people, living harmoniously – they have been there long before Europeans came to the Americas. They have been there for thousands of years. They have beaten death, and they cannot be taken by it. What we need in order to fight It – to fight death itself – is their wisdom. Their knowledge.”

Stan fidgets again. Bill lets his eyes look someplace else – his next words are targeted enough.

“Think of it as a metaphor, if need be. We’ve all come too far to back out at this point.”

Folding his hands behind his back, he begins to pace slowly, the heat of the campfire behind him warming his calves.

“To gain the wisdom of the ancients, we need to become equals to them – we need to _learn how to learn_ on a level that they do. Think of it like you would a mathematical formula or – or chemistry. Alchemy, of a sort. There are a finite number of tools you can combine to help you achieve enlightenment. With the right combination, we can all become strong enough to learn how to conquer It and defeat Its monopoly on death. The defining feature of the nine immortals is their cohesion. They are a group. We also need to become a group.”

Richie furrows his brow, looking around, confused.

“Isn’t that what we are now?”

Bill shakes his head.

“Right now, we’re a collective of individuals. We need to learn to think and act with unity. Individualism is what’ll weaken us – It is not strong enough to take down all of us, but one at a time? We’re vulnerable.”

Bill walks around the back of the fire. He lifts up a sweater he’s placed nearby, holding it out so that everyone can see it.

“Burning our clothes is the first step in the process of de-individualization. I started with my typewriter, but for you, I think clothing will suffice. Consider them stand-ins – effigies – avatars. Possessions will shackle us – make us afraid to dare. Things we wear to express ourselves, or to suit our lifestyles, will only hold us back.”

He lowers his sweater into the flames and watches them lick at the wool.

“Come forward and burn your clothes. Mike – you will have to help Henry.”

Hesitant, the group wavers. Audra then rises, a sundress draped over her forearm, and casts it into the fire. That spurs Bev into action, and she walks to the edge, tossing her skirt and shirt on the pyre.

“That’s it – come on, guys – shoes too.”

“Bill – these are sixty-dollar shoes –”

“Burn them, Stan. If you don’t want to die, you’re gonna have to burn them. If we destroy our own self image, then It can’t use it to get to us.”

One by one, the ragtag band throws their belongings, shoes and all, into the fire. Bill summarizes, as they watch the pile burn.

“When we focus our attention on thinking about ownership, about property, we lose sight of the bigger picture.”

Once the clothes are taken care of, Bill looks over to Audra and gives her a nod. She rises to her feet and begins to fill cups with the broth she’s been tending for more than a day.

“Audra made this using plants we’ve collected here, on the mountain, and along our journeys, our travels. Always in nature – fresh from the earth, dried with care with aid of the sun. We never bought them – these are all as they were grown, in their most honest form. Think about it. Plants – we gained mastery over them – over nature – with violence. Domination. Domestic plants are weakened and synthetic compounds don’t compare – the real answers lie in the potent ancestors to the cultivars we curate. We shaped and twisted everything to our own will. These plants, though – these wild plants – are the same as they ever were. They’re potent – they’re pure. They have wisdom in it. Drink – and that wisdom will become yours, too.”

As Audra presses a cup into Richie’s hand, he laughs nervously.

“Aren’t you gonna have some too, Bill? I feel like a lab rat just taking this while you stare at me.”

“Bill is our guide,” Audra answers before her husband has to. “He will abstain, that we may drink even deeper.”

“Great,” Richie grimaces. “This smells… earthy.”

“On three,” Audra says. “One – two – three –”

The initial swallowing is followed by protests, gagging. Mike’s hands shake as he holds the cup to Henry’s slack lips.

“This tastes terrible,” Ben comments, wincing.

“Join hands now,” Bill says. “Join hands and close your eyes…”

* * *

_One-eyed men aren't really reigning_   
_They just march in place until_   
_Two-eyed men with mystery training_   
_Finally feel the power fill_   
_Three-eyed men are not complaining._   
_They can yo-yo where they will_   
_They slip inside this house as they pass by._   
_Don't pass it by._

\- "Slip Inside This House" - 13th Floor Elevators

* * *

“… look up and… and the… will be… eyes.”

Ben’s hearing cuts in and out in accordance with the off-beats of his heart. On the down, _ba DUM,_ he loses all senses, the throbbing cutting him off from the world. A world that, suddenly, is miles beneath him.

The sensory confusion of unexpectedly finding himself floating very high above the ground is quickly superseded by the fact that he has no body – or, rather, that his body has been fundamentally changed. _I’m some kind of bird,_ he realizes with wonder. How, he decides, doesn’t matter – not when the sky is so huge, so blue that it’s almost painful to look at.

All at once, he nosedives, down, down, fast as a bullet, and he lands on some small desert rodent, tearing it apart with his talons.

Iron. Copper. Minerals. Earth. The alchemy of blood and meat turned into fuel. He digs his beak into the heaving side of the animal as it twitches and chokes on its own fluids. Salt. Metal. Tang. Sharp. He eats and tears and tears and eats until the tiny rib-cage springs open like a jack-in-the-box and a still-beating heart swims before him. His vision is hazy, shuddery. He has never known hunger-lust-triumph like this. The domination is thrilling.

He opens his mouth wide and eats the organ whole.

The death spasms of a small animal stutter beneath Mike’s feet. Wing-arms feel naked, folded close to his sides. Feather-fingers grope – where’s his rifle? Where’s his rifle? _What’d you go and lose your weapon for, soldier?_ No matter – backup – knife? Talons. Talons. Talons in the chest of the animal at his feet. Talons in the chest of the teenager at his feet. Knife in the chest of the teenager at his feet. Blood on his hands from the teenager at his feet. Hot sun on the back of his neck, sticky-hot blood on his palms, his face. _Him or me. Him or me – he’d have killed me. He’d have –_ dead like an animal. Killed like a desert rodent. Blood on Mike’s beak. In in his mouth.

The bird leaves her kill on the mountain, flies her body away, away, the alure of the desert, the sand glinting like a sea of tiny mirrors, crystalline refractions of light dazzling her eyes. Beauty – Bev has never seen beauty like this before. It staggers her – this immense expanse of sparkling land. She hadn’t known there was so much land – that there could ever be so much land in all the world – but maybe it’s just that she is so small, now, her slight wings and tapered body climbing higher and higher towards the gold disc of the sun, leaving the earth behind, below, forgotten. Her body thrums with freedom.

As the Stan’s body rises ever upwards, his eyes water, the pain of looking into the great golden ball of the sun is too much for them. Up close, the heat is excruciating, and the amber light is closer to white – of bone, of bared teeth, of greasepaint. The flesh of the bird’s face begins to bubble and pop. The fat beneath his skin liquifies and begins to run out from his mouth, his ears, his eyes. His senses are filled with blood and fat and pain the likes of which he’s never known, not ever, but he cannot look away. He cannot – but he is so enraptured by the white orb of the sun that he forgets to flap his wings, and all at once, he’s falling hard and fast towards the barren earth.

chaos open sky bright fireball burning burning death is skull white corpse white orderly hospital walls white floor white clown mouth to swallow henry greed devouring and teeth and teeth and teeth pinned strapped trapped pain scramble pain struggle pain struggle _CAUGHT_

Desperate, aching, Eddie feels his wings strain to correct his descent. There’s water beneath him somewhere – the spring! – and he knows it will be cool on his burning skin. With herculean effort, he sticks the landing, and drags his broken body towards the water’s edge. In the shade of some scrub on the shore, he dips his face into the icy trickle of the mountain stream.

* * *

_The dog will take your senses away with him. He can see for you. The delicate scent of flowers is the fragrance of the universe. I eat the flower, and its perfume is my blood. Together we form a dog, in search of the sacred flower. Together we form a flower, in search of the sacred water. This is the moment when the word is made flesh.*_

* * *

When Richie comes back to his body, he’s lying on his stomach next to the spring, staring at the water as it burbles past him. It is the single most beautiful thing that he has ever seen. The sunlight weaves undulating ribbons, brightly dancing over the surface of the water. He presses a hand to his face – it feels hot. He sticks his hand into the water and cups some, splashing it towards himself. His eyes wrinkle up as it hits him – a million tiny pinpricks of icy relief. He groans aloud through a parched throat, dips his head down like an animal to drink. He plunges down, and down, and down, the two inches of water stretching on infinitely, space enough for his whole body to be submerged, all nerve endings concentrated in his sunburned face and stinging, open eyes.

Patricia convulses in the shallows and is sick. Her mind in reeling, her thoughts are squirming, slippery things. _Where’s Stan?_ She scratches at the earth. Her body stretches, pretzels, warms. She is coiling and uncoiling. She is writhing and still. The earth is sandpaper-rough on her skin and it _hurts._ She drives her palms over the parched ground, skins her knees, peels herself like an onion, like a snake shedding skin. Her consciousness expands omnidirectionally.

Audra sits up, eyes closed, face tilted skywards. The sun is a balm on her skin. _Bill’s got you this far – he’s right, he’s right – it’s working, it feels so good._ Audra is an incoherent shape. Audra is dematerializing. Audra is nothing and everything. The individual is nothing, the spirit is everything. The mind becomes nothing and everything. The flesh is but shackles. The sky is open to receive. The mountain-stairway is clear. Bill’s voice rings out clear as a bell in the swirling expanse of the universe, a guiding light, a beacon home. Her lighthouse keeper – he draws the flock to gather at his feet – leave the spring, leave your clothes, leave yourselves. Naked, they kneel before him, open eyes and mouths. Audra tilts her head up, body bowing in and down, _Bitilasana._ She parts her lips. Her tongue extends. Bill has mushrooms in his hands. Bill has mushrooms for his hands. The mushroom-man with five-stalked hands marks his blessing on the flat of her pink tongue. The earth is her sex, and it aches for him. She squeezes the hands she holds, sweaty hands, firm hands, whose hands don’t matter. They are of one body. One flesh.

* * *

_Live where your heart can be given_   
_And your life starts to unfold_   
_In the forms you envision_   
_In this dream that's ages old_   
_On the river layer is the only sayer_   
_You receive all you can hold_

\- "Slip Inside This House" - 13th Floor Elevators

* * *

Bill gathers his friends. After he doses them again, they reach a sort of chemical stasis – they are heightened, they are frightened, but they are stable and able to hear. Receptive, too. Patient. The women are trembling, slick-thighed, and the men are erect, but they do not fidget. They sit still. They listen.

 _So far so good,_ Bill thinks, some distant part of himself – the part that’s still just an author from Maine with all the worries of an everyday person – feels relief that he’d gotten them this far. His books and his lore and his dreams and his visions have all been clear enough but there’s knowing a thing and doing a thing. _And we’re doing it. We’re doing it. No backing out now, Bill. They need you._

He clears his throat.

“Come around the fire pit. Stand just as you are. No need to link hands now.”

While the group was busy crawling around in the dirt, Bill doused the fire with a bucket of water he’d reserved for the occasion. The pit is still hot to the touch and smoking, but not enough to cause damage to a person should they fall upon it.

“We’ve established that It is an avatar of death, of unmaking, of the negative energies in this universe. To beat It, to overcome death, we must learn to pass through it. This is the ceremony of death,” he states. Nine pairs of eyes twitch wildly behind closed lids. The group, of its own accord, begins to sway and ripple in unison, like some kind of loosely joined collective organism.

“This pyre is your grave, and it receives you with love. Don’t fight it. Embrace it. Surrender to the process – it is the most natural thing in the world, as easy to die as it is to breathe, as effortless. Just stop fighting. You’re safer here than anywhere else on this planet.”

As expected, one of the group starts weeping. Bill does not know who, precisely, as soon, everyone is crying. Richie – loud and brash and angry in his sobbing – Stan, white-faced and terrified – Mike shaking his head, a low, keening wail rising out of his throat.

“You’ve all had such a long road to walk. You’ve all born so many horrors – you can leave them, now. Surrender. It’s so easy, if you just let yourself let go of yourself. Return what was loaned to you.”

He casts his eyes around the circle as he speaks.

“Give up your pleasure, your pains.”

Ben, hiccuping as he sobs. Stan, rocking in place on his heels, one hand tugging at his earlobe, a return to childhood self-soothing.

“Give up your friends, your lovers.”

Richie, face screwed up as he struggles through the sensory overload. Mike, sagging beneath the weight of his grief.

“Give up your family, your past.”

Eddie, nose running, sniffling, blinking fast against the tidal wave of his tears. Bev, shuddering, wringing her hands as though to wash them free of some unseen stain.

“You will know nothingness – it is the only reality. Don’t be afraid. It’s so easy to give.”

Henry drools and curls his body like a worm, jamming the heels of his hands into his eyes over and over again.

“You are not alone. You have a grave. It is your first mother.”

Audra, beautiful Audra. She weeps but does not fight, standing still as a statue and just letting the tears flow without fanfare down her cheeks, her mouth shut, making no sound.

“The grave is the door to your rebirth.”

Patty surprises him with a sudden cry, falling to her knees in desperate want as she crawls towards the firepit. Bill gathers himself and keeps going. _This is good. This is working. They will be okay._

After Patty, others follow. They sink to the ground and crawl to the pit. The hot, blackened wood breaks under their hands and knees. The carbon smears on their nude bodies. They flinch at the sting of the heat, and they crave it, and seek it out again.

“Now you will surrender the faithful animal you once called your body. Don't try to keep it,” Bill calls over the rising volume of their agonized vocalizations, “Remember, it was a loan. Surrender your legs, surrender your sex, your hair, your blood, your organs, your bones. You no longer want to possess. Possession is the ultimate pain.”

Bev takes handfuls of hot earth and rubs them into her hair. Stan flattens himself against the warm ground and shudders. Henry places a burnt edge of one of the discarded clothes from before into his mouth, chewing it until it froths his spit and turns it dark.

They are loud now, loud enough that Bill has to shout to be heard, and shout he does, voice hoarse, throat searing, raw.

“The earth falls over your corpse! She comes to cover you with love, because she is your true flesh! Now you are an empty heart, open to receive your true essence – your own perfection, your new body, which is the universe, the work of God. You will be born again, you will be real, you will be your own father, your own mother, your own child, your own perfection. Open your eyes! You are the earth, you are the green, you are the blue, you are the Aleph, you are the essence! Look at the world around you – the spring, the sky. It is the opposite of sewers where you've lived and struggled all your lives - look at the sky. For the first time, look at the sky!”

The group regains its collective awareness through the raising of heavy eyelids, crusted shut with tears. The sobbing continues, different now, uniformly hysterical and relieved. With no thought to their nakedness, they sling arms around each other and laugh as they cry. The laughter is deafening, as though screaming in victory, _WE LIVE, WE LIVE, WE LIVE, YOU PARAGON OF DEATH, WE LIVE AND YOU WILL NOT TAKE US_.

Bill’s mouth twitches with a smile he can’t quite hide. _It worked. Holy heck, it worked._

He raises his hands and the dirty bodies in the pit fall still, turning to look at him in a single movement, a single swivel of the head.

“Now,” he breathes, triumphant, “now, you are a group.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's the original script text from tHm, and keep in mind, in the film this takes up like... a shit-ton of time because everyone's tripping and it's hella visual, so it takes a long time to get from one paragraph to the next.
> 
> "Nine Immortal men live on top of the mountain. From the highest peak they direct our world. They hold the secret to the conquest of death. They are more than 40,000 years old. But they were once like ourselves. If others have succeeded in conquering death, why must we accept it? I know where the Immortals live and how to obtain their secret. In this ancient Rosicrucian manuscript, I found an etching of the Nine Immortals and the place where they live. The holy mountain of Lotus Island. Some men join forces to assault banks and steal money, pieces of paper. We must unite our forces to assault the holy mountain, and rob its wise men of their secret of immortality. But to conquer the wisdom of the Immortals, we too must become wise men. The elements of chemistry are many, but finite. So are the techniques of enlightenment. To reach it more quickly we will combine the techniques. With the correct formula, any human being can become enlightened. The Immortals are a group. If we are to succeed, we must cease to be individuals, and become a collective being. Burn your money! Thief! If you don't want to die, kill your money. We shall destroy the self image, unsteady, wavering, bewildered, full of desire, distracted, confused. When the self concept thinks, this is I and that is mine, he binds himself and he forgets the great self. 
> 
> Man learned to cultivate the earth by weakening the plants, wild plants remained as they were  
> at the moment of creation. They are the humble guardians of the secret. The flower knows... you don't need to ask it. 
> 
> The dog will take your senses away with him. He can see for you. The delicate scent of flowers is the fragrance of the universe. I eat the flower, and its perfume is my blood. Together we form a dog, in search of the sacred flower. Together we form a flower, in search of the sacred water. This is the moment when the word is made flesh. 
> 
> How many people are you? One, two, three, four, five... We are nine. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine... - One is missing. - Yes. Here is the missing one. He drowned. He drowned.
> 
> This is the ceremony of death. The grave receives you with love. Surrender yourselves to death.  
> Return what was loaned to you. Give up your pleasure, your pains. Give up your friends, your lovers. Give up your family, your past. Surrender what you hate, what you desire. You will know nothingness - it is the only reality. Don't be afraid. It's so easy to give. You are not alone. You have a grave. It is your first mother. The grave is the door to your rebirth. Now you will surrender the faithful animal you once called your body. Don't try to keep it. Remember, it was a loan. Surrender your legs, surrender your sex, your hair, your blood, your organs, your bones. You no longer want to possess. Possession is the ultimate pain. The earth falls over your corpse. She comes to cover you with love, because she is your true flesh. Now you are an empty heart, open to receive your true essence. Your own perfection, your new body, which is the universe, the work of God. You will be born again, you will be real, you will be your own father, your own mother, your own child, your own perfection. Open your eyes. You are the earth, you are the green, you are the blue, you are the Aleph, you are the essence. Look at the flower. Look at the flower. For the first time, look at the flowers. Now, you are a group."


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Added one more chapter on the end of this because I've decided I will write an epilogue after all.
> 
> Warnings for this chapter include death and medical-related body horror. Oh and war trauma, I guess. Honestly I'm really struggling to know where even to warn in this fic because tbh it's all pretty heavy. At this point, you're in as deep as I am. It'll be whatever it is.
> 
> The poem choice for this chapter is inspired by a great little poetry/photograph anthology called In & Out of Love, arranged by Bruce Vance. It's an anthology of poetry about love from all different times/places, combined with photos, mostly of hippie couples, from 1971. If you ever come across it, it's worth a look, and it reminded me that Rupert Brooke exists, so for that alone, I am glad to have read it.
> 
> Also, I think I've peaked in terms of 'on the nose song choices.' With that said, if you want to listen along:
> 
> "The End" - the Doors (1967)  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOW7i7aWQoE

* * *

_This is the end, beautiful friend_  
_This is the end, my only friend, the end_  
_Of our elaborate plans, the end_  
_Of everything that stands, the end_  
_No safety or surprise, the end_  
_I'll never look into your eyes, again_

\- "The End" - The Doors

* * *

“Where do we go from here?”

In the hours that follow, emotions run high. The sense of having survived something tremendous is electric and wild. Of course, the mountain still looms, of course, the climb will be difficult, but tonight? Tonight we live, tonight we are survivors, tonight our pain cannot touch us…

Patty retrieves her makeup bag from the luggage in her tent. With the limited options available, she paints a little flower on her right cheek. Audra emerges from her own tent with face paints and the girls go mad with colour and flowers. Richie joins in, happy to have a jolly sunflower on his forehead. Eddie gets a blue cornflower. In time, everyone is wearing little blossoms, laughing heartily.

The love within the group is palpable, the affection is like a warm and safe hug. Each of them, privately, is startled by how badly they’ve needed just such an embrace, just such an expression of kindness for its own sake. It makes them cling to each other all the more, for this, they know, collectively, is the most precious asset they have ever had claim to in their lives.

After a dinner of crackers, jerky, nuts, and dried fruits, the group just sits together, the fire burning lowly beside them, their bodies wrapped in shawls and rugs and afghans. They speak freely, stories, memories, easily shared. This is a place without judgment. This is a place of absolute security – the eye of the storm, around which evil waits for them to conquer it. Bev leans her head on Ben’s shoulder. Patty kisses the little daisy she’s drawn on Stan’s face. Eddie tangles his fingers with Richie’s.

When the moon hangs, silver-cold and beautiful above them, they leave their circle and return to their tents. In the desert, animals are vocalizing, chirping, buzzing. Richie listens to the faint sounds of the other couples in their tent-sanctuaries, then roles Eddie beneath him and kisses and shifts and _loves._

And then, in time, it is morning.

* * *

Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill,   
Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass.   
You said, ‘Through glory and ecstasy we pass;  
Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds sing still,  
When we are old, are old….’ ‘And when we die   
All’s over that is ours; and life burns on  
Through other lovers, other lips,’ said I,   
‘Heart of my heart, our heaven is now, is won!’ 

‘We are Earth’s best, that learnt her lesson here.   
Life is our cry. We have kept the faith!’ we said;   
‘We shall go down with unreluctant tread  
Rose-crowned into the darkness!’…Proud we were,  
And laughed, that had such brave true things to say.  
—And then you suddenly cried, and turned away.

  
\- Rupert Brooke _'The Hill'_ (1910)

* * *

Going up the mountain is not an easy feat, and that’s without taking into account the fact that Henry needs to be propelled in some way, whether by wheelchair or by being physically steered by the shoulders. (They elect to take the chair. It’s light enough they can carry it over the rough patches, and it makes the smooth patches easier.) Still, they’ve come this far, Bill is hopeful, and his hope is enough for everyone else to hold onto for now. Spirits are up, the future is bright, all that good shit, and really, how bad can it be, after everything they’ve faced so far?

They travel light – just makeshift cloaks, loincloths, and enough dry food to last them. They leave their tents and sleep huddled together as one body, sprawled across the earth.

For three days, everything is just about perfect.

Pity, them. Pity them, for perfection is ephemeral by nature. When the shit hits the fan, it hits hard and brutal, in the form of something swift and slithering, almost as if to say ‘you foolish, foolish children, there is so much yet you have to endure.’

The serpent comes as a surprise. The group had paused for water and light snacks in the shade of a large outcropping of rock. The dark spot had been chosen as a blessed relief from the stinking heat of high noon in South Texas, when it is too dangerous to risk hiking at all. The break would see them through until the day grew cooler, and the low scrub gave them enough privacy that they felt sheltered and safe.

The scrub had not been safe, however – or rather, it had been the safe haven of desert denizens who had lived there long before our intrepid explorers ever ventured by.

One minute, they are settling in the coarse growth on the mountainside, thoughts filled with recollections of nearly-turned ankles and almost-skinned knees, and the next, Richie is hollering and jumping to his feet in blanched terror.

“Fucking – a snake – look out!”

The group panics – Stan trips and against the rough rock wall behind him, bloodying his knuckles badly as he reaches out to steady himself – and Mike, returning opportunely from scouting for a place to refill their canteens, acts quickly, hand lightning fast as it carves through the air with the knife he keeps on his hip. In a matter of seconds, the snake is sliced cleanly in two. The head lies inert as the body twitches and writhes, then is still.

“Red next to yellow kills a fellow – this thing’s venomous. Check yourselves, everybody – anyone get bit?”

Everyone checks. No one is bit. The tension, little by little, uncoils, and their lungs can expand again, if not free and easy, then at least free. Other than Stan’s hand, they’re fine. Shaken, they debate their options.

“It’s still too hot to be walking around for long,” Ben argues, but Bev interrupts him.

“I’m not staying here – if there’s one snake, what if there’s more?”

“What if there isn’t? Stan, bud, do you have any snake facts buried in among the bird facts in your brain?” Richie asks, and Stan furrows his brow, thinking.

“Well, theoretically speaking, there could be a mating ball –”

“A what?!” Eddie pales.

“You know – when snakes all fuck in a big heap,” Richie explains, “only, until now, I always just figured that was garter snakes.”

“It’s more than one kind of snake. I don’t know if it’s coral snakes do – that’s a coral snake over there, probably a Texas coral given our current circumstances – from what I remember, not that I know much about them, they’re quite shy.”

“Didn’t seem shy to me,” Richie argues, glaring at the dead reptile.

“Close call,” Ben shudders. “Jesus.”

“We’re okay,” Bill says firmly. “Let’s walk on – at least until we find a different patch of shade.”

The group recommences the climb. The heat of the sun is particularly bad given the hour. Audra feels faint, her movements growing sluggish, and the group is forced to stop at the next spot they see – a small cave in the mountainside, in which they take shelter. As Bill holds up the canteen for Audra to drink, careful not to spill a drop, (Mike had been unsuccessful in finding another water source before the snake struck, and they haven’t stumbled across one since,) Richie curses and picks at his skin. Redheads never do well in the heat, and even though his hair’s darkened with age, and he’s spent enough time outdoors to have at least a slight tan, the direct sunlight has been getting to him, and badly. His forehead and the bridge of his nose are scaly and peeling. Eddie looks at the back of his neck and whistles.

“Jeez, Richie, that looks bad. You’re red as a beet back there.”

Richie, too sore for chucks, just grunts and holds his hand out for the canteen when Audra is done with it. He takes a swig, caps it, then groans.

“This is gonna fuckin’ kill me. I’m not built for climbing mountains, Eds.”

“None of us are,” Stan retorts, checking the makeshift bandage he’s fashioned out of a pocket handkerchief. The cotton over his knuckles is flecked with blood.

Richie opens his mouth to retort, but is cut off by a choking sound. Stan looks up, alarmed, momentarily certain it’s Richie who’s choking – but no – Richie looks every bit as confused – and sound of lung – as he does.

It takes a moment for the group to realize where the sound is coming from, and by the time they do, Henry is slumped forward in his wheelchair, his lips turning blue.

“The hell is going on?” Ben exclaims, alarmed. Mike is already in action, searching Henry’s hands and feet, cursing to himself. He finds what he’s looking for – and dreading – on the back of Henry’s heel. A bite mark.

“Coral snake venom is neuro-toxic,” Stan supplies haltingly. “It – it can induce respiratory failure.”

“How the hell do you know that?” Richie shouts, panicked.

“There was a warning in the travel map we bought – about what to look out for on – on hiking trails,” Stan falters, looking to Patty in genuine fear. She comes to his side and takes his uninjured hand in hers.

“What the hell are we going to do, Bill?” Ben asks. “Should we be giving him – I don’t know – CPR or something?”

“Won’t help,” Mike says flatly, his eyes inward-shuttered, soul all shut up tight. Dull. “They made us do a training exercise before we shipped out – on what to do if we ever got bit by something in the jungle. Some kinds of venom, you can cut the skin and suck it out – but it’s been too long already, and I don’t know if coral snakes are the right kind – I think that’s just for the ones that affect the blood stream.”

Henry struggles sluggishly in his chair, gagging softly, face like a cow on a killing floor, not aware enough to know how much it’s got to suffer, but aware enough it knows it’s going to die.

“So what, do we just watch it kill him?” Ben hisses. Bill shakes his head, his face pale.

“There’s not much else we can do, except keep him – comfortable as we can.” _In a cave. In the wilderness._

As individuals, each of the people gathered in that cave had different impressions of Henry – different parameters to the scope of their forgiveness. As a group, however, they have come to see this helpless, vacant-eyed man as a sad, ultimately harmless entity, notable only for the depths of his own suffering. He is suffering even more, now – choking to death slowly as the muscles in his chest and belly fail. Suffocating inside himself – and all the while, being too brain-scrambled to understand where he is, what he’s feeling, or why it’s happening. His eyes bulge and roll pleadingly from person to person, begging. Desperate.

“We could – we could speed it along.”

The words, spoken in a small voice, leave Bev even as she presses a hand to her lips, disgusted with herself.

“Oh, God, no, I don’t – I didn’t mean –”

“She’s right,” Mike says in the hard, brittle voice that makes him sound hollow and dead as an old tree. “This could take hours. It already has taken hours. It was my fault – I didn’t notice the bite. It’s my responsibility.”

“Mike –” Ben begins but can’t force the rest past his teeth. _It’s not your fault? Or is it all of our faults? We all bought in. No one of us could get here alone._ Bill looks at Mike for what feels like the longest minute in history.

“If you want to pass the task to someone else, I would be willing to –”

“I’ve killed before – once before. It’s already changed me. You think you’re… ready. You’re not. With respect, Bill, I’m not sure you’d survive it.”

The rest of the group fidgets uncomfortably. They feel like they’re intruding on something – some push-and-pull, some battle of wills that extends beyond this moment – that’s probably gone on in some form or other since Mike came to the mountain, or even before that, in the fuzzy ambiguity of childhood. Bill and Mike have always been stronger, but they’re strong in different ways, and Mike has a rationality, a realism, that Bill doesn’t. They both know this – they _all_ know this. Bill wouldn’t survive it – he’d crack along the fault line of guilt he still carries for his brother’s death.

* * *

_The killer awoke before dawn_  
_He put his boots on_  
_He took a face from the ancient gallery_  
_And he walked on down the hall_

\- "The End" - The Doors

* * *

They leave Mike and Henry in the cave. Bill and Audra go off in one direction to huddle close and press their foreheads together, leaving the others to fend for themselves.

Outside, Richie draws a hand over his moustache, as though surprised by his mouth’s stillness. It’s rare that he has absolutely nothing to say. Eddie, dear Eddie, steps close beside him. They’re long past hiding the affection they feel – it’s unimportant, irrelevant. They haven’t taken any heat for it – that’d be pointless too. Eddie reaches out and pulls Richie’s hand away from his face, squeezing gently.

“It’d break Bill,” he says in a voice just above a whisper, “but what if it breaks Mike too?”

“It will,” Ben says, walking over to join them. “All the work he’s done to leave the Mike who kills back in Commie country? Gone. Like that.” He snaps his fingers and Patty groans, shaking her head in frustration.

“This is insane – this is insane, Stan, there are hospitals – there are doctors – there’s –”

“Not out here,” he sighs, face pinched, tight. “No – this is the most… ethical thing to do. Especially seeing as –”

Mike takes that moment to re-emerge, wiping his knife clean on the edge of his loincloth. The look on his face is scarier than any clown, and Richie recognizes it immediately, recognizes it as that horrific death mask visage from Mike’s self-portrait, the one in the photo album that Richie was not supposed to see.

“It’s over.”

His voice is clipped, short, and devastating as a pistol shot. It seems to knock the air out of Bill, who is returning, and who sags against Audra like a puppet with his strings cut. Bev turns and vomits in the dirt.

“Was it –” Richie falters, “I mean, did –”

“It was quick. He didn’t suffer.”

“Are you okay?” Ben asks Mike in a low voice, arms around Bev’s shaking shoulders.

“We’ll walk on.”

It’s not an answer, and yet, in some awful way, it is.

They’ve committed to this now, but only now, now that they’re one man down and mute with horror, is it sinking in that this is a march towards a cliff, towards a pit, towards an execution. In the claustrophobic prison of his head, Richie screams, itching to tear himself away from the monotonous repetition of planting one foot in front of the other. _You didn’t even like Henry,_ he thinks wildly, _the guy was a nut who had tortured you for years –_ but that argument falls apart when Richie remembers the deformed wolf he killed, and how he’d felt afterwards. Like he was more gun than man. He wonders if Mike feels more knife than man, and then thinks, that’s a stupid question. More likely, Mike’s felt like a weapon for years and has just been pushing it away, burying it with his books about mantras and meditation, like he isn’t aware that that evil’s already tainted him, changed him, maimed him.

_Like it’s maimed all of us._

Bill is the only one who speaks – he’s been speaking incessantly, and has gone from leading the group to bringing up the rear, muttering softly to Audra under his breath, variation upon variation of the same thing, over and over again.

“I swear I didn’t bring him here to kill him – I didn’t know the sacrifice’d mean blood, I didn’t know we’d lose people – not yet – and I swear I didn’t bring him here as collateral – I knew there had to be nine of us – I knew – but I thought if I was leading I didn’t count – I didn’t think that – Audra I didn’t bring him here to sacrifice him – you have to believe me I wouldn’t _do_ that, not even to Henry – not to _anybody_ –”

Mike takes over the task of leading like he was born – no. No, not born. _Trained_ for it. And, surprising no one, he’s brilliant in the role – so brilliant it almost makes up for the hollowness, the shadow with him now.

Up they climb. One man down and spirits fading. But Mike refuses to let them give up and after what he’s done for them, who would dare turn back now?

The silence fills the space that Henry leaves and sits like a fat slug, suckling on the teat of their collective mental strain, a leech on the brain.

After another two days, even Bill falls impotently silent.

* * *

_Can you picture what will be?_  
_So limitless and free_  
_Desperately in need_  
_Of some stranger's hand_

_In a desperate land_

\- "The End" - The Doors

* * *

The higher they travel, the colder and more desolate the nights become. After the snake strike, they are too scared to sleep within the shelter of shrubbery and brush. Instead, they huddle like a herd of cattle in the open and sleep fitfully. What dreams they have are horrible, twisting things, writhing like the headless snake, empty as Mike’s eyes as he cleans his knife. He’s taken to cleaning it hourly, whether it needs it or not. The movement is a metronome that marks time – the only thing that lets them know that any time, that any distance, has truly passed.

Richie’s eyelids, sunburned, begin to peel and crack. He grits his teeth, then learns to follow Eddie with his eyes mostly closed, holding onto one trailing end of raw silk that used to serve as Patty’s top. When she saw the state his eyes were in, she gave it to him without comment, and now, Eddie leads him like a mule, and like a mule, he does not try to speak.

Stan’s hand, which has been stinking for days, finally becomes too much for him, and by the time he admits it’s still hurting him, that his fingers are too stiff to bend and that, when he tries, the joints weep putrid fluid, he’s waxy-faced and sweating. He doesn’t take it up with Bill – he brings it directly to Mike, cementing his role as captain of this unidealistic chapter of their journey. Mike’s cold practicality is surgical precision and battlefield medicine in turns. This superman of gunpowder, cynicism, and steel – Richie doesn’t recognize him at all.

“You were never able to forget your body, never able to pry yourself from that love.”

The pronouncement is the sound of an axe on a chopping block. The depth of the situation rolls away from Mike’s mouth like a chicken head after culling.

“Now the thing you love most is stopping you from reaching the top. You must sacrifice part of your body.”

He presses his knife into Stan’s quivering grip.

“Cut off your fingers, or go back!”

Stan tries and fails. The coordination of his non-dominant hand isn’t up to the task. _If you leave those fingers on him, he’ll go the same way as Henry, and you’ll be down another._ The understanding is intrinsic among the group – it needs no commentary. They stare as he tries again, and again, drops Mike’s knife in the dirt at his feet. He reaches for it once more, but is stopped short when another hand precedes him.

Patty with the blade, Patty, his sweet Patty.

He cries with equal parts relief and sorrow as she amputates three of his fingers. They leave them, pale, curled maggots, on the ground, and they walk on.

Within a day, they’ve left the last of the plant-life behind them. It’s nothing but rock, now, as coarse and unforgiving as the surface of the moon. The water is gone – run out a few day’s back – and they’d taken to drinking their own urine until they were pissing amber, and then not pissing at all, their bladders cramping, inflamed from the concentration of minerals they're unable to pass. At that point, Mike passes his knife around, and they take to sucking on their own cut wrists, their blood thick and unable to do much more than offer momentary relief to their dry, cracked mouths. Bill’s been treading on the fringes of delirium for most of this time, and at some point, he raises his lolling head with difficulty and the red-brown ring of his mouth struggles to form words.

“We have mastered the difficult part of the mountain. Nevertheless, at this height our minds will decompose. And we will suffer the vision of death.”

Richie convulses with what he supposes might, in a long-ago-time, have been a laugh. He cannot see Bill’s face – his eyes are swollen shut – but he can imagine the bewildered realization that they’re well and truly fucked crossing that big shaved egg of a head, and damned if it doesn’t make him wish that he had the strength left to grin.

* * *

_It hurts to set you free_  
_But you'll never follow me_  
_The end of laughter and soft lies_  
_The end of nights we tried to die_

_This is the end_

\- "The End" - The Doors

* * *

The hallucinations that follow are bad, but not as bad as the pain of their physical bodies, worn to the bone. It’s a different kind of hallucination from what everyone’s used to. It’s not a chemical high – it’s a confusion, an un-coordination, a dislocation of the senses. It’s so bad that Audra almost wanders off, alone, in a state of disorientation. After that, they strip to their skin and use their loincloths to form a sort of fabric chain, linking them together so that they cannot becomes separated. They climb on feet that have gone from blistered to bursting to shapeless, blunt objects, swollen and slick with blood. They climb until their fingers are raw from the rocks, until their fingernails and toenails peel away like the skin of an onion. They climb until they know, with certainty, that they are all going to die on this mountain, and that there will be no justice, no confrontation, no killing It at all.

And then, impossibly, it snows.

It isn’t much – an unexpected winter dusting – hardly a snowfall at all by most people’s standards outside of Texas, but for them, dehydrated as they are, it’s lifesaving. They lie on their backs on the rock and open their mouths, letting the snow land on their faces, their tongues, their lips. They let it soothe their hot, aching bodies. _Deus ex machina,_ one, or more, of them thinks, in a mind like a broken mirror. Like the universe doesn’t want it to end here – and that must mean something, it has to – we’re so close now, so close to the end.

When they’ve had enough fluid to regain some sense of themselves, they eat the rest of the food rations. It’s not important, now, to get home – somehow, they all know this. Whatever this is building towards, it will end at the mountaintop. There will be no going home – not the way they came up. With food and water in their bellies, the pain of their flesh is amplified until it is almost overwhelming. The only thing stronger than the desire to indulge in a mass suicide, a mercy killing, is the drive to get to the top that is, now, so close, just within reach.

They tie themselves more tightly together, lean on each other for strength, become a single, many-legged entity, and they drag themselves, limping, to the peak.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In writing this, I learned that they stopped making Texas coral snake antivenom in like... 2008 or so. And the last batch expired in 2020. Because it wasn't profitable enough to warrant making it. So THAT's horrifying.
> 
> Mike's dialogue re: fingers, and Bill's re: mind decomposition are both borrowed from the Holy Mountain, with some minor changes.
> 
> In their original form they read as:
> 
> "You were never able to forget your body, never able to pry yourself from that love. Now the thing you love most is stopping you from reaching the top. You must sacrifice part of your body. Cut off your fingers, or go back!"
> 
> and 
> 
> "We have mastered the difficult part of the mountain. Now the way will be like a garden. Nevertheless, at this height our minds will decompose. And we will suffer the vision of death."
> 
> respectively.
> 
> Also I've taken some narrative/stylistic liberties re: dehydration, weather, etc. I've tried to make it plausible but it is quite possibly medically and meteorologically improbable. That goes for the mountain itself too. I've never hiked mountains in El Paso and almost certainly never will. So this is probably all very unlikely indeed.


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Baby Blue is a great song, but while Bob Dylan's version is quintessentially Dylan in style, the 13th Floor Elevators cover is just... like 100 times more melancholic-sounding. So that's the version I'm using for this. 
> 
> Listen along if you like:  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBg6Yz6k2KQ - Baby Blue, 13th Floor Elevators (1967)

* * *

_You must leave now, take what you need  
_ _You think will last  
_ _But whatever you wish to keep  
_ _You better grab it fast_

 _Yonder stands your orphan with his gun  
_ _He's crying like a fire in the sun  
_ _Strike another match, go start anew  
_ _It's all over now, Baby Blue_

\- "[It's All Over Now] Baby Blue" - 13th Floor Elevators (covering Bob Dylan)

* * *

THE NIGHT BEFORE THE ASCENT

* * *

“So, what do these immortal guys look like, anyway?”

Richie shoves dried apricots into his mouth as he asks, muffling the tail end of the sentence somewhat.

“Yeah, Bill – what are we actually going to find up there?” Ben grins fingers playing with the ends of Bev’s hair as she leans against him.

“Well,” Bill admits, “our prospector from the archives is pretty vague about that – only that there’s something there that’ll teach us to cheat death and, therefore, probably protect us from It – not that he was worried about that when he wrote about it. He just wanted to see if they also had riches up there.”

“How could a group of people still be alive all that time later? It’s impossible,” Stan interjects – not as forcefully as he would have before their ritual grouping, but still, at his heart, a skeptic.

“They’re immortal, Stan,” Eddie shrugs. “Answer is kind of in the name, there.”

“Maybe they are a commune,” Bev suggests. “Maybe they don’t live forever-forever, but they live isolated, safe. Their kids, grandkids, whatever may be up there.”

“Well whoever they are, I just hope they have more up there to eat than these damn dry fruits – I feel like I’m chewing on an old man’s bal –”

“Beep beep, Richie!” Bev laughs, kicking at him lightly in play.

“What? Is that not what they look like to you?”

He holds two up, side by side, for emphasis, and everyone – even Patty (grudgingly) - finds it in themselves to laugh.

* * *

PRESENT, AT THE MOUNTAIN TOP

* * *

“What’s here?” Richie asks the silence. “You don’t need to build the anticipation up, guys, I’m plenty excited.”

He tugs on the fabric tying him to Eddie.

“Spaghetti man,” he presses. “What’s here?”

“There’s,” he hears Eddie begin, then falter. “Th-theres –”

“There’s nobody,” Bev interrupts, voice wavering with disbelief. “There’s… nobody else up here.”

If the silence before was bad, the silence now is terrible, deafening. For Richie, already blinded and never a fan of low-stimulation environments, this is akin to a hell much like that of the last leg of their climb. He sinks to his knees and begins crawling, patting the ground around him with an open hand.

“Richie, what are you doing?”

Eddie sounds exhausted – tired – _tired of me?_ Richie tries not to let his growing doubt eat at him.

“There’s gotta be something up here – just because you losers are too – too worn out not to see it – there’s gotta be _something!_ ”

He hates that his voice is so clearly the voice of a man in a state of raw terror. He barely sounds like himself.

“Richie, there’s _nothing here_! Will you – will you stop, for God’s sake, you’re all but pulling us over, crawling around like that!” Eddie snaps and Richie reels on him, bristling.

“What would you have me do, your highness?”

“Guys, let’s just take it easy –” Stan begins, but Richie’s on a roll now, desperate and angry and so unbelievably sad that his body just can’t hold it anymore. He splits along his seams like an overfilled bag of grain, spilling everywhere.

“Stan, you lost three fucking fingers over this!”

That shuts him up alright – he can hear the sharp intake of breath like he’s been punched and knows he’s wounded him, and it shouldn’t feel good – not at all – these are his _best friends_ – but Richie has always solved every problem in his life by throwing words at it and you don’t wind up divorced in your twenties if you haven’t learned how to barb those words before deploying them. It’s petty, it’s stupid – they’re all gonna die, and Richie doesn’t want his last moments to be a dumb argument, but if he stops now, then he acknowledges that _these are his last moments,_ and that is more than he can bear.

“Henry lost his goddamn life – sure, it wasn’t much of a life and he was basically a vegetable, but he didn’t have to die for _nothing._ And Bill? You’ve cracked up, lost your mystical mojo, whatever – Mike, you’re back to square one – might as well have stayed in Saigon –”

“Shut up, Richie,” Ben says firmly – no ‘beep beep,’ not this time.

“Or what? Was all this just some – some fucking collateral damage so that you could get it on with Miss Broken Heart over here?”

“Shut the _fuck_ up – you _brought us here!_ You made us join!” Ben retorts, and Richie almost laughs at how predictable it all is – him rushing to Bev’s defence like that.

“Yeah, and it was pretty easy, if I recall. You came running almost like you didn’t have anything else to live for.”

“Jesus Christ,” Ben says, and he sounds so fucking _tired_ and Richie hates it almost as much as he hates himself. Ben keeps at him like a flea on a dog. The irritation is mutually dissatisfying.

“You really know when to bail, huh? Couldn’t have held it in for – oh I don’t know – the next couple of hours?”

“What happens in the next couple of hours?”

Bev’s voice is tiny, shaking. Richie knows it’s because of him – because he’s yelling – Bev hates yelling – she hates it.

“We’re all gonna fuckin’ die! That’s what’ll happen!” Richie roars because he’s just as damned predictable as the rest of them.

The sound of Bev crying is one of the worst things Richie’s heard in his whole life. The knowledge he’s the cause of it hurts far worse than his ex-wife’s crocodile tears ever did, hurts on par with Eddie in the VW back in Derry when he tripped and Richie’s heart was torn out of his chest and dragged along for the ride.

“You’re a real son of a bitch, you know that?” Ben shouts back and Bev whimpers.

“Stop yelling, both of you – you’re scaring her!” But Audra’s words just bounce off their ears, unheard.

Ben and Richie are on the warpath now, yelling at each other in futile _stupid_ desperation, lashing out like the scared animals that they are. Their jabs open old wounds – no rules here, they go below the belt, for the face, the eyes – _you’re inconsiderate and immature – you’re aloof and arrogant – your ex-wife was the luckiest woman on earth to get the hell out of dodge – oh, sure, because every girl you and your frat brothers ever took for a spin was treated like fucking royalty – you afraid everyone hates you – yeah, well you’re afraid because you hate yourself – right, as if you don’t –_ and so on. Bev is still crying and, if he could hear over the blood rushing in his ears, Richie would note that Patty has gone over to speak soothingly to her.

“Guys – hey, guys – look at this! I found – it’s a…”

Bill’s voice rises above the chaos and the group quiets.

“What?” Richie asks. “What – what the fuck does he have? What’s happening, for Christ’s sake?”

“It’s a turtle shell,” Ben sighs. “It’s just an old turtle shell, Bill.”

“But why’s it up here? How’d it get here? No way a turtle could’ve walked all this way – it’s gotta – it’s gotta…”

“Bird could’ve dropped it,” Stan says and it’s at that point that Richie feels something cool and dry pressed into his hand. He palms over it – sure enough, an empty turtle shell – both halves still attached with desiccated tissue. There’s nothing inside it. It’s empty. Pointless.

“What the hell good is this?” Richie shouts, voice cracking, and flings the thing away. There's a collective flinch as it flies, soars, like the best pitch in a baseball game. Richie, who never had much of an arm on him, the butt of one last cosmic joke.

“Richie! You – you just threw it off the mountain! Why’d you do that?! It could’ve been important!” Audra cries and Richie damn near bites her head off.

“It could’ve been important? Audra – I know you want to believe your husband’s the Second Coming or some shit but that’s just a dried up dead reptile carcass and Stan’s right – this whole thing was bullshit – we should never have come up here and now it’s gonna fuckin’ kill us. We’re gonna die for this. So don’t you yell at me for throwing the damn shell – you yell at your husband for spinning a line and dragging us all up here! Damn clown didn’t even have to lift a finger – we’ve fuckin’ done this to ourselves!”

With that statement, whatever thread was holding the group together snaps, and the whole thing topples. Amid the crying and the yelling and the low keening wails, Richie retreats, crawling over to lean against a boulder, all the shame and pain of a dog that bit in fear and was kicked for biting.

His eyes are too fucked up for crying to work right, and the sting of salt is like a nail in each socket. He rocks in place, sobs so hard he has to cram his fingers into his mouth to keep from screaming. He’s horrified – at the mountain, at the lack of a payoff, but mostly at himself. Especially at himself.

A hand settles in his hair – Eddie – he can tell from the way he traces patterns on his scalp – the way they’d done when they were freshly on the road – before the mountain, before Texas, even before Bev. When it was just the two of them, just two hearts and enough hope to carry them.

* * *

_All your seasick sailors_  
_They are rowing home_  
_And all your empty-handed armies_  
_They are going home_

_Your lover who just walked out the door_  
_Is standing in the clothes that you once wore_  
_The carpet, too, is moving under you_  
_And it's all over now, Baby Blue_

\- "[It's All Over Now] Baby Blue" - 13th Floor Elevators (covering Bob Dylan)

* * *

It takes about ten minutes for the fight to burn through them. They’re all too tired, too weak, and what replaces the quick spark of anger is something that’s more like mourning. Eddie pets Richie’s hair and speaks up quietly, timid in the wake of such a blatant outpouring of pain.

“What… what should we do now? Practically speaking.”

Stan sighs and looks up from where he’s been arranging rocks, loincloths, and other bits of debris into an SOS that could be seen from the air.

“Now we wait, I guess. We can’t get back down the way we came up.”

“I just – I can’t believe – nothing? _Nothing?_ After everything we went through, I just… I don’t understand it,” Bill mutters, shaking his head. “I just don’t understand where we went so wrong.”

“I don’t think we did,” Mike says, startling the others. He’s been quiet for a long time, just sitting by himself in mute reflection. “Go wrong, I mean. I think – I think this _is_ the answer.”

When no one moves to interrupt him, he continues.

“This is Maya.”

“Come again?” Ben asks, brow furrowed.

“Maya. A reality that isn’t real – or at least, not spiritually real. I can’t say I fully understand it – I’ve not spent enough time looking into it to know the details, but from what I do understand, it’s the idea that this reality is an illusion. A place that is and isn’t real. And this – this mountain – this is the heart of the thing. This is where we can see behind the curtain – so to speak. That’s what we’re doing, here, now. That’s the answer.”

“Mike that’s… brilliant. You’re brilliant,” Bill says, eyes brightening. “That does make sense.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m going to need a bit more of an explanation than that,” Ben admits. “It’s all Greek to me.”

“We assumed that we’d get up here and this would be the end of the road. That we’d either find a way to defeat It now, or a way to arm ourselves to defeat It later. But reality isn’t built on finite limitations. Nothing has an end. We came in search of the secret of immortality. To be like gods. And here we are. . . mortals. More human than ever,” Bill explains, “and if we have not obtained immortality, at least we have obtained reality. God – the arrogance that led us here… My arrogance. It’s been a millstone around our necks this entire time – guessing that by leaving our possessions we’d be checking our egos at the door but we’re still the same people – we’re different, but we’re still the same, too. I mean, could we have ever hoped to defeat all the evil in the universe – us, unremarkable human beings? There’s no way. When it’s taken millennia to get us here and we’re still just as venal and petty and blind to our own faults as we were when we emerged from the primordial ooze? Can we stamp out all that is in Man that makes him kill and hurt? Say we could kill It – then what? Would that bring an end to wars? To exploitation? The actions of a few everyday people against the inevitability of death?”

“Maybe it’s impossible,” Mike suggests hesitantly, audibly lost in thought, his words coming slow. “Maybe… it’d be like trying to eradicate gravity. If you think about the Wheel of Life – in Buddhism – you’ve got different realms, right? Each with their own… baggage. Their own denizens, their own problems. And it’s never really a question of ending that – least not as far as I’ve ever read. You can try to get yourself out of the cycle – to change yourself so you’re not able to fall victim to the same shit over and over again. But the cycle - samsara – that shit is pretty much essential to how the whole cosmos operates.”

The eyes of the group – even Richie’s swollen-shut ones, are all on him. Mike looks around at the range of expressions on the faces of his friends and shrugs.

“Maybe _that’s_ the point of this whole thing.”

“You’ve given me a lot to think about,” Bill says with a ghost of a smile. “Thank you.”

“Yeah, well. While you to debate the universe, I think I’ll lay down and die. Maybe I’ll get reborn as something too unevolved to know how stupid we all were for climbing to our deaths up here,” Richie says with the dregs of his venom, the last flicker of spirit in him as his energy reserves fail him. He lies back, hands pillowed behind his head, and sighs once – a deep, sorry sigh – sorry for the whole damn predicament they’re all in, and sorry for the part he played in orchestrating it.

“Gimme a kiss, sweetheart, for I’m off for the great beyond!” he declares. Eddie kisses his forehead.

“Don’t talk like that,” he whispers, pained. _“Please.”_

“Can’t help you, kid. Talking’s all I can do, now we’ve –”

“Shut up,” Eddie hisses, and kisses him again and again and again and again...

* * *

RANGER’S STATION, GUADALUPE MOUNTAINS NATIONAL PARK

* * *

The radio crackles to life, startling the occupant of the small office from his ritual of reading the funnies and chewing tobacco. Technically, he’s still on his break, but he answers it anyway. Call it a sixth sense, but he just feels like he ought to.

“Ranger Dave here. Over.”

“Heya Dave-o, this is Rattler, I’m seein’ what looks like an S.O.S. on the top of a mountain on the range about – oh I’d say fifteen minutes air-time from your location. Over.”

“Got any more details on that, chief?”

“Lemme just fly in closer – there’s – hell, Dave there’s what looks to be ten-odd teenagers up here – looks like some kind of love-in gone wrong – Dave, man, they’re all naked as jaybirds! Uh, over!”

Ranger Dave sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose. Just his luck that it is fixing to be one of _those days._

“Alright, how much room’ve you got – can you get ‘em in two trips?”

“Better make it three – can you get medical on the line – get all that set up for ‘em? I’ll bring the worst ones in first.”

Another sigh, this one heavier than the last.

“I’ll sort it out. You just get those kids rounded up and brought home. Try to get names out of ‘em – see if they’re local. See if they’ve got folks we should call, over.”

“Roger that, Dave-o, over and out!”

With a groan, Dave hangs up the phone and curses. He’s been telling head office about those damned kids and their illegal communes for the better part of two months. Doggone bureaucracy’s been bullshitting him six ways from Sunday, as per usual. _You’d think for a park not yet two years old they’d get a little more support_ , he thinks, _but that’s the feds for you._ Not for the first time, he wonders if he should’ve followed in his father’s footsteps and gone into ranching. Fewer headaches at least – cows don’t get delusions of grandeur or go off on madcap adventures, not like out-of-state adolescents do, anyway.

“Goddamn hippies,” he sighs, and spits with more force than is strictly necessary.

* * *

ON THE MOUNTAIN

* * *

“Did you see that – hey, guys – look!”

Stan’s excitement draws the attention of the rest of the group who perk up just as the sound of helicopter blades reaches them.

“What – is that – are we being rescued?” Richie exclaims. Eddie’s tight hug is all the answer he needs.

“I never thought I’d be happy, seeing one of those again,” Mike laughs in disbelief, and the sound electrifies the group into action.

“Over here!” Bev shouts, waving her arms. “We’re here!”

“Help us!” Stan adds. The helicopter makes its descent, and, in due time, a skinny man with a molasses-thick drawl sticks his head out the open side to greet them.

“Hey, you kids – I’m a volunteer for the National Park service – I’m here to take you home. It’ll take 3 trips so give me the sickest ones first and stay put when I leave you!”

Bill looks around the group.

“That’ll be you guys,” he says. “Stan, Richie.”

“Patty too,” Eddie says, giving Richie’s shoulder a discrete squeeze. “You two should go together.”

“Can y’all walk? You need help gettin’ in?”

“We’ve got it,” Bill shouts over the racket of the machine. “Thank you!”

The next few minutes are spent getting the three passengers into the helicopter, after which, the pilot, who calls himself Rattler, addresses his charges.

“I’d say hold on to your hats,” he laughs, “but seein’ as you’re all stark naked – we’re takin’ off now.”

As the helicopter passes over the mountain range, the pilot keeps rambling.

“How in the hell’d you get all the way up there? And where’s your clothes? There’s a safety blanket back there somewhere – let the little lady cover on up. _Whooee!_ – two tours of duty and this is the strangest damn thing I ever did see, I’ll tell you what –”

Richie rests his head back against the seat, happy to let someone else do the talking.

* * *

_Leave your stepping stones behind_

_There's something that calls for you_  
_Forget the dead you've left_  
_They will not follow you_

_Your vagabond who's rapping at your door_  
_Is standing in the clothes that you once wore_  
_The sky, too, is falling over you_  
_And it's all over now, Baby Blue_

_It's all over now, Baby Blue_

\- "[It's All Over Now] Baby Blue" - 13th Floor Elevators (covering Bob Dylan)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guadalupe National Park apparently opened in 1972, just in time for this fic. I love it when history lines up like that.
> 
> Also I would say that Mike, in this, knows more than I do about Buddhism, but even then, he doesn't know as much as an actual Buddhist by a long-shot. Regardless, here's hoping I didn't butcher it too badly. I'm currently reading a pretty great book about the intersection of Buddhist philosophy and Western psychotherapy which is (so far anyway) pretty neat. It's called Thoughts Without A Thinker by Mark Epstein and it's honestly one of the better things I've read recently. Highly recommend it, especially the first third, which is essentially a Buddhist primer for noobs, coming at it more philosophically/psychologically and less religiously, for any of y'all who may find that alienating.
> 
> I know Ranger Dave and Helicopter man Rattler are random throwaways I invented for plot reasons, but I really enjoyed writing them at their cheesiest. Rattler basically just became Murdock from the original A-Team, oh well lol.
> 
> The whole discussion of Maya is lifted from/stolen/paraphrased from/heavily inspired by The Holy Mountain's ending so... spoilers for the non-edited text I'm about to post, I guess. (Or skip the rest of this note.) It occurs to me now most of this fic, in paralleling the Holy Mountain, also kind of spoils the Holy Mountain. I should probably have warned about that. It didn't occur to me as I'm someone who always reads plot summaries to things before I watch them because I hate being surprised. But I may add a note retroactively near the beginning. Given the challenging nature of that film (the animal cruelty alone would probably turn off a lot of people) I would say that it's not for everyone, anyway, but I do think that if you feel compelled to watch it, you should, and don't feel that by me quoting from it or spoiling some of the plot it'd be ruined - most of it's appeal extends beyond the literal content of the script, IMO. Anyway, the original goes like this:
> 
> “I promised you the great secret and I will not disappoint you. Is this the end of our adventure?  
> Nothing has an end. We came in search of the secret of immortality. To be like gods. And here we are. . . mortals. More human than ever. If we have not obtained immortality, at least we have obtained reality. We began in a fairytale and we came to life!  
> [There's some extra script here with a twist involved, but I'm not going to put it here so I don't ruin it for you more than I already have.]  
> This is Maya. Goodbye to the holy mountain. Real life awaits us."


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, it's over. And it ended more or less exactly the way I planned it to, so I actually stayed on task, which is a rarity in itself.
> 
> We've got a poem in this one - I've attributed it to the 1963 collection 'Honey and Salt' of Sandburg's poems but I'm not entirely sure that's its first place of publication and realistically I'm too busy to check now and unlikely to check later, so it is what it is.
> 
> For listening-along purposes, we've got one of my all-time favourite 13th Floor Elevators tracks which I'm so happy I could work in, but I'm actually going to link it in the end-notes as I think it serves the epilogue better to listen to it once you've read how everything turns out.

* * *

ONE YEAR LATER, DERRY, MAINE

* * *

Why did he write to her,  
"I can't live without you"?  
And why did she write to him,  
"I can't live without you"?  
For he went west, she went east,  
And they both lived.

\- Carl Sandburg, _'One Parting'_ (1963)

* * *

Recovery is a slow process of lurching stops and starts, but it is far more linear, far smoother, than the psycho-spiritual processing which is required in the aftermath of what Eddie has come to refer to as the Summit Experience. The medical care alone is expensive. Mike’s sent to a VA hospital, and Ben gets some support from the university, and Eddie himself has some savings set aside for health emergencies, but the rest of them recover on Stan and Patty’s dime – for that, Eddie is profoundly grateful. When the doctors, rangers, and lawmen ask, they don’t give a solid reason for their journey to the mountaintop. They maintain plausible deniability – no drugs are found on them (they never admit to the camp, and bus, by the trailhead as being theirs, and the law cannot prove otherwise.) Stan is respectable enough to spin a story about a hiking trip gone wrong, where getting lost caused them to drift into delirium and behave strangely. Their only infraction is the relatively minor one of failing to properly inform the park rangers before setting out. In the end, they’re given stern warnings. It could, they are all aware, have been a lot worse on that front.

Somehow, though, the lack of any real punishment just emphasizes the lack of any real concrete conclusion, and the unreality of it reminds Eddie of his memory lapses – memory lapses which, now, he can’t truly say he’s sure are caused by some supernatural being. Maybe it was some kind of trauma – some Freudian repression. Lord knows he has enough to be repressed about, he thinks, when he arrives back home to find the yard, and the house, exactly as they were.

Derry is as he left it. A nasty, backwards little town just like a whole host of nasty, backwards little towns all across the nation – all of them tarred with an ugliness of their own making, no It needed. Somehow, that, too, makes much of the year feel like a fever dream. He isn’t sure what he expects – some kind of damnation, or at least scorn, from his mother, but instead he’s just greeted with a cool smugness wrapped in a façade of relief. _I knew you’d be back,_ her eyes say as she feigns concern. _I always knew you’d come back._

And maybe it’s for the best – the time away. Time to grieve, time to think. Not time to forget – never that. He knows that he won’t forget – can’t forget Stan’s mangled hand or the way the skin on his feet heals back scarred from where the mountain chafed it off. Can’t forget Henry, entombed in a cave – hopefully at peace now. They couldn’t retrieve the body – to do so would admit what Mike had done, and while they all privately agree he did the right thing in the moment, none of them want to see how that’d go over in court. Henry doesn’t have family to miss him – no one to care. Eddie’s not sure what would be worse – lying to someone that you know the whereabouts of a missing, or not needing to lie in the first place. After living through the latter he’s still not sure. He supposes neither needs to be worse than the other. It’s just another scar the mountain left him with.

Of the lot of them, Bill was the first to bounce back both figuratively and literally. He has Audra, which helps – the two of them went west with Ben and Bev to California. The psychedelic scene keeps them busy; the art scene keeps them busier. Last Eddie’s heard, Bill’s writing again. Ben’s back in school, though he has had to move into married student accommodations. Bev’s there to stay, this time.

Once Mike gets out of the VA hospital, he sells what little he owns, takes the money left to him by his parents and flies away East – far further than Maine - to the overland. The mountain spoke a truth to him that makes the hippie trail seem like a natural successor, and one that Eddie sincerely hopes will help calm the unrest in him. He writes often, and his letters are always head-scratchers of the best kind. Eddie devours them even when he cannot understand all the ins and outs of them. He treasures the postmarks, the photographs – Kabul, Kathmandu, Goa… places Eddie knows he will never see himself – at least not so long as Ma is alive and even after that, it seems unlikely. Travelling all over the country took all the wanderlust out of him.

Stan and Patty go back to Georgia, shaken, but not enough to really change. Or - maybe that’s an unfair assessment. They seem… looser. Sure, not in an incense and peppermints way, but in a way that, for Stan and Patty, is distinctly less buttoned-up that when they started. They’re talking about adoption in their letters a lot these days, especially Stan, who admits in private correspondence to Eddie that he’d been more bothered by the idea than Patty had, fearful that such a child would only remind them – remind her especially – of their own personal failings in the fertility department. ‘But that’s the equivalent of tilting at windmills, really. We’ve got the room, we’ve got the money, we’ve got the love – why not?’ Turns out that talking about the problem, rather than just dancing around it, changes things.

So, in some sense, everything is much as it was. The individuals change in subtle ways, but the big picture keeps on turning, cycling through as it always does.

The only thing that really feels jarring is that Eddie feels a distinct Richie-shaped hole in his life that was never a problem before. He isn’t sure what he expects Richie to say or do when they’re healed up and ready to move on, but in a way, it’s no surprise that the lovable, fragile coward is still too scared to do any more than run. Richie blames himself for their failure to… to what? Be heroes? It seems absurd for one man to take on the burden of ‘not being able to right all the wrongs in the universe’ but Richie is a maximalist – he’s said it before himself. He asks – to be fair, he does ask – ‘come along,’ he says – but come along where? The Eddie who followed, wonder-struck, is not the Eddie who has come down from the mountain. This new, third Eddie is neither the shrinking violet nor the wild renegade. He’s just himself – a being existing, or at least trying to exist, in a balanced state. Maybe the mountain gave him that to chew on – the ability to recognize that by running away again, he’d only be trading in one fear for another.

 _So,_ he amends, _maybe things have changed more than I give them credit for._

He’s different now – he is. He knows he doesn’t look it, else there’d have been more than a few days of gossip when he got back. To most people in Derry, even to his mother’s friends, his entire, universe-challenging sojourn can be summed up as ‘little Eddie took a tumble, but he’s all-right now.’ In a way, this camouflages him, so he doesn’t mind it as much as he otherwise might. His mother senses it, though, and the more time passes, he can see that it disturbs her greatly – to see him carry himself with some private dignity she cannot touch. She would prefer him screaming profanities and threatening to leave, he thinks. Instead, he is civil – courteous even – but when she pries or tries to needle him about something, he simply rises from the table, or the chair, or the sofa, and says ‘I think I’ll go read for a while.’

And he does, whether she wants him to or not.

This opens all kinds of doors for him. He can get all sorts of things for himself that he’d never have thought possible. A new job – he’s working at the pharmacy now. Ma had bristled at that but he had told her the pay was good, he’d get some of his medicine on a discount, and that standing for a few hours a day won’t kill him. Working there is good for him – Keene was right to reach out and offer him a job. He’s learning not only how many of his own medicines are smoke and mirrors, but also, perhaps more importantly, how many people actually are sick, out there in the world. He’s empathetic, too – it’s an asset to any business to have a guy in front-of-house who knows how to make people feel like they’re being listened to and Eddie’s a natural. And any locals who remember him as a child, sickly, frail, look at him now and think ‘hell, if the Wheezing Wonder could get better, maybe my ulcer isn’t as much of a misery as I thought.’

The job’s not the only victory, either. He successfully negotiates nights out (once a week for a bridge game, just so he has something to do,) and a change to the house rules that permit him to smoke tobacco in his bedroom with the window open (which he only does at most once a month, but knowing he _can_ is delightful, each puff a private 'fuck-you' to the aspirator sitting in his bedside drawer.

Honestly, it’s thrilling. The ability to set boundaries – Eddie would admit he was a late bloomer in that regard, but now that he’s learning, he feels unstoppable. His anger, his frustration, his pain – it all flows neatly into this new reservoir of _NO._ He doesn’t even have to say the word. He can refuse Ma simply by calmly walking away, and she has too much pride to physically restrain him.

Perhaps it’s a coincidence, but the more time he devotes to exploring this balance – this acceptance of his anger at himself, and at her – the less productive it seems to carry it around with him and, by extension, the less wound up about it he is. Fear loosens its hold on him. Mike, in one of his letters, tells him something about transcending his pain by accepting its inevitability, and while much of it goes over Eddie’s head, he has to admit, he’s finding truth in it, in his own way, in his own time. Equally, the more he finds calm within himself, the less unsafe he feels. The chilling grip that’s been encircling his heart unwinds day by day. He checks the hedgerow for the watch he’d found there, checks the roadside on the way into town, searches the underbrush for any remains of the deformed wolf, and maybe it means nothing, and maybe it means everything, but he can find neither.

(And maybe, maybe-maybe, the ambiguity is inevitable too.)

So, when he drinks his tea with a dash of lemon and reads Bill’s latest book while his mother watches a variety show on television, he feels… not overwhelmingly happy – but happiness, Mike would say, is inherently fleeting. Better to strive for peaceful contentment, he’d say, better to set a goal realistic within the parameters of the universe – and really, while not perfect, Eddie would say he is reasonably peaceful, reasonably content, sitting there as he is, ignoring Ma, the TV rolling over his senses without penetrating his mind. He isn’t happy, fine, but he isn’t scared either, he isn’t frail, and he isn’t breaking. He’s just Eddie, at home, with tea and house slippers and a mother who has stopped bothering to tell him to take some of his medications because she knows that Eddie won’t listen and that fighting him will change nothing.

That’s it then. Not a bad outcome, all told, not for Eddie at least. Really the only thing that still _does_ cause him to worry these days is Richie, and even then, only late at night, before he falls into blissfully forgettable dreams. He can’t help but wonder where that cherry red bus is parked, whether Richie is sleeping – if he’s sleeping well. (If he’s sleeping alone.) That last thought is always a footnote, embarrassing even within his own head. Eddie hardly has a claim on him – they weren’t even explicitly exclusive even before they parted ways, but now, almost a year later to the day since he’s last seen him? He’s got no leg to stand on where that’s concerned. Still, he cannot help but think of Richie often and at least wish him well, and he’d be lying if he said he didn’t miss him. He hasn’t made any effort to move on, personally. The idea of being with anyone else seems… incongruous in the context of his life.

It’s incongruous enough that when he’s outside – still in slippers and a robe over his pyjamas (itself a victory, as there was a time Ma would never let him have risked ‘catching his death’) – and he sees that cherry red VW bus rolling down the street towards his house, he drops the mail he went outside to collect and has to scramble madly to collect it all again.

 _It can’t be him,_ he thinks dumbly. _What could possibly have brought him back here again? Surely not me – surely not – us – surely not._

But it is him – Richie – in a shearling coat and faded jeans, locking the bus, still facing away – not having looked up – not having seen –

 _I’m in a robe and slippers!_ Eddie thinks frantically and laughs aloud at the absurdity. That is enough to alert Richie, who turns in surprise, before a grin spreads wide across his face. They stand there, dumbly, on opposite sides of the road, just staring and smiling like a couple of loons.

“Hi, Eds,” Richie ventures, almost shy.

“Don’t call me Eds,” Eddie retorts, giddy. He looks both ways – not that there’s really any traffic to speak of on the quiet residential street, but old, cautious habits die hard – before jogging over and yanking Richie into a hug so big and strong it knocks the air out of him.

“Oof!” Richie laughs, “Jesus, Eddie, you been working out or something?”

“Or something,” he chuckles, pulling back. “It’s amazing what putting your psychosomatic illnesses behind you will do for a guy.”

“I’ll say,” Richie beams, grabbing him firmly by the upper arms and looking him over, “God, you look great! I’ll admit, when I heard you’d gone back home to Mother, I was a little worried I’d have to come around and corrupt you all over again.”

Eddie snorts and shakes his head.

“You don’t look so bad yourself,” he dares, taking in that thick moustache – some how even more… moustachey than the last time he’d seen it. “How’ve you been?”

“Oh, you know,” Richie shrugs. “Life on the open road and all that. I’m basically totally uncivilized, but other than that I’m okay. Say, Spaghetti man, how’s about you and me take the old girl for a spin, huh?”

 _It’s Saturday morning,_ old-Eddie screams shrilly in the back of Eddie’s brain, but he’s gotten pretty good at ignoring that voice these days, so he nods and excuses himself to get changed into something more roadworthy.

Ma catches him as he’s jogging down the stairs, keys in hand.

“Where are you going? I thought you already brought the mail in – you have a grapefruit waiting in the fridge –”

“I’m going for a drive, Ma.”

“A drive? With who?”

He pauses. Old Eddie would’ve never gotten this far, and intermediate Eddie would’ve screamed _‘I’m going out with the man I’m in love with because I’m an unrepentant faggot and put that in your pipe and smoke it!’_ but current, present-day Eddie doesn’t think either of those things are the right answer, really.

“A friend of mine’s passing through town. I’m going to drive around with him, then take him for brunch.”

At the sight of her stunned face, he smiles and adds, “and if you want my grapefruit, you can have it, Ma – don’t worry – I can always buy more.”

He doesn’t run, doesn’t cringe. He just walks out the door and even dares to whistle as he locks up and saunters over to the bus. Richie is standing, shaking his head at him in disbelief.

“What the hell happened to you, man? You’re like a different person.”

No sense cowering now, Eddie thinks, so he answers honestly as he climbs into the passenger seat.

“Being rescued from a mountaintop while half-dead, I guess.”

He waits until they’re on the road before he asks the question that’s been on the tip of his tongue since the bus reappeared in his life.

“So… what are you doing here?”

Richie’s hands tighten slightly on the wheel, and his eyes don’t leave the road.

“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking,” he says, which is not particularly helpfully.

“That’s… good? I guess? Do you want to be thinking?”

“I want to be happy,” Richie blurts out, startling Eddie with the sudden intensity and volume. “Sorry – sorry, I told you. Too long in my own company. Didn’t mean to make you jump. I swear I’m working on the… volume thing.”

“No, it’s fine. I… are you not happy?”

“It’s complicated.”

Eddie gropes for something to say to that.

“Mike’s pretty sure that happiness is just a temporary state anyway. We’re better off striving for contentment.”

“Are you content, Spaghetti?”

Eddie shrugs.

“I’m not ‘not content.’ Why, are you… not?”

“No,” Richie admits. “I’m not. I… I got married again.”

Eddie’s stomach drops and he struggles to keep a straight face. _You don’t own him, Eddie. You cut him loose. This was always a possibility – you know how much he hates being alone._

“Oh yeah?” he manages. “Good for you –”

“Yeah. And then two months later, I got divorced again.”

Eddie’s eyes widen. He turns in his seat a bit, looking over in disbelief.

“Richie – what – why?” he splutters.

“She wasn’t you,” he confesses and, as Eddie reels from this particular confession, he continues talking like the verbal steamroller he is. “I don’t want to say that, honestly I feel like I’m just lining myself up for you to rip my balls off for being an asshole but – you were right about me. I’ve been running – I’ve been running a long time.”

Eddie furrows his brow.

“I never said ‘running,’ I just –”

“You didn’t have to. I know. I’ve _known,_ I just… there’s always been this… this big emptiness in me. And I tried to fill it up with jokes – that didn’t work – and then with drugs and drinking and women – that didn’t work either. You can’t just... consume your way to feeling better - not in any way that lasts. And being around you, I –”

Eddie – this new Eddie – sees an opportunity and can’t not take it.

“You want me to fill you up, Richie?”

Richie’s hand slips on the wheel. The horn gives a little toot of surprise. He looks at Eddie in wonder, then bursts out laughing.

“You son of a bitch – you’re stepping on my lines, here!”

“I’m sorry,” Eddie pleads, laughing too. “I’m sorry but it was right there. You’d have taken it. Why _didn’t_ you take it?”

Richie’s smile fades a bit.

“I just… I’m too nervous I guess. Two marriages under my belt and I’m not even thirty – and Christ, Eds, if I fuck this up again, I’ll –”

Eddie places a hand on the back of Richie’s neck, squeezing gently. Richie shudders and leans into it.

“You know I always loved it when you did that?”

“Did what?”

“This – with your hand. It’s… it’s nice. It’s _grounding._ I missed it. I missed you.”

Eddie falters.

“I missed you too, Rich – you gotta know that. There’s not – there’s not been anyone else for me.”

“Would you take me back?”

There it is – the big question. Eddie pulls his hand away.

“Richie, I never gave you up in the first place. That was all you.”

Richie lets out a sigh.

“I know,” he groans. “God, I fucked up, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t – you didn’t mean it. You had… all your emptiness going on.”

Richie grins at that and shakes his head, turning off the main road and taking one of the paths into the forested outskirts of the town. Eddie realizes, dimly, that they’re back where it started – back where he took that tab of what he increasingly thinks was just a badly made LSD analogue, just a chemical coincidence.

“I love you,” Eddie declares, because he means it, and because he’s not sure Richie’s in a state of mind to say it first. Richie latches on like he hoped he would.

“I – this is what I mean – the emptiness – maybe that’s always gonna be in me – maybe I’m always gonna feel like I don’t really fit in this town, in this world, in _myself,_ and when I’m around you it’s… it’s different.”

“Different good?”

“Yeah, I mean, I guess so. I don’t want you to fix me – I know you can’t, anyway, but I – I don’t resent you for not figuring me out. And that sounds… kind of not how I wanted it to, but I mean like –” Richie pauses, takes a deep breath, and tries again, “ – I mean like I want to be the best Richie Tozier there is when I’m around you – and not just to keep you off my back, or to keep you in my bed, but because I feel like you’ve already seen him somehow, like you’ve proven his existence just by sticking around, and all that’s left is for me to… to be like him.”

“You _are_ him.”

“I know – I know that. I’m trying to… get it to take, I guess. I don’t know. But I know that you’re the only person I’ve ever been with where I feel like sticking around is making me get better and not worse. And… honestly I feel like I’d be the luckiest guy in the world if you’d take me back. I can’t promise I won’t fuck up again but –”

“None of us can promise that,” Eddie interrupts. “We’re all just where we’re at.”

Richie nods.

“We’re where we’re at.” He drums his fingers on the steering wheel. “Yeah.”

“Richie?”

“Yeah?”

“We could… be where we’re at together. I’d like that.”

Richie turns in his seat and hugs him – a different kind of hug than before, this one long and lingering, face buried in his hair, just breathing him in, acclimatizing to his presence again.

“Together. God, I need this like you wouldn’t believe – I – there’s so much uncertainty in the universe, Eddie, sometimes I feel like it’s gonna eat me alive –”

“Richie –”

“What, Eds?”

“There’s certainty in uncertainty too, you know? We’ll figure it out. Day by day, if we have to. But I’m game to try if you are.”

“Okay,” Richie murmurs into his shoulder. “Okay.”

In the grand scheme of things, maybe nothing ever really changes. Maybe, Eddie reflects later when he’s helping Rich move his meagre belongings into a cheap apartment in town – just temporary – just until they decide what they’re really doing, where the road will take them next – maybe the macro-scale universe will always be, more or less, the way it is. And maybe every town has its share of evils lurking in the shadows and the drains. It’s not okay, and it’s not not okay. It just is. They can waste their lives tilting at windmills, as Stan would put it, or they can... not. And maybe – maybe that means there’s no big triumph, no big victory. Maybe some people fuck up, or get fucked up, and it’s not a question of it being fair or unfair. It’s just the hand you’re dealt, and how you choose to play with it. Eddie supposes the hand he was dealt is neither the worst nor the best it could’ve been, but he's making do, now, which is different. Better. _You can’t mitigate all risk and still have much of a life,_ he thinks, and feels the first touch of genuine sympathy he’s ever felt for his mother, whose whole existence has been wasted doing just that, and only for there to be nothing much for her to show for her trouble.

No.

No, for Eddie at least, and for Richie and maybe for the others too, this is the way out, _their_ way out – stepping beyond the whole cycle of shit and misery. Maybe it’s not grand, maybe it’s not some – some boyhood fantasy of supremacy, the slaying of the proverbial dragon, whatever – but it’s enough – just him and Richie eating hamburgers out of Styrofoam clam-shells as they huddle over the sink to keep from getting crumbs on the floor; or laughing as Richie glues his sleeve to a roach trap (old buildings – it’s basically guaranteed they’ll need the damn things.) It’s enough to just be two content-ish people cleaving out a little peace in an otherwise entropic universe – a universe in which, really, they’re both so small, so insignificant, that no one else will ever care about the way the corners of Richie’s eyes crinkle when he smiles, or the way Eddie laughs so much more freely, when Richie’s around. _We don’t need to be heroes,_ Eddie thinks, wiping away mustard caught in Richie’s moustache with the pad of his thumb as Richie makes a face and tries to lick his fingers. _We can just be us. We’ve earned that much._

* * *

_Chaos all around me_   
_with its fevered clinging_   
_but I can hear you singing_   
_in the corners of my brain_   
  
_Every doubt that bound me_   
_Every sound of riot_   
_Everything is quiet_   
_but the song that keeps me sane_

_I can hear your voice_   
_echoing my voice softly_   
_I can feel your strength reinforcing mine_

_If you fear I'll lose my spirit like a drunkard's wasted wine_   
_Don't you even think about it_

_I'm feelin' fine_

\- "Slip Inside This House" - 13th Floor Elevators

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> While you enjoy  
> I had to tell you - 13th Floor Elevators (1967)  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPGlKlgBCPs
> 
> here are some final thoughts.
> 
> I love the story of IT as a story of childhood, of confronting and overcoming trauma, and of the scars that our pasts leave on our presents and futures. I do think that I prefer it, personally, as a metaphor more than anything else (no judgment if you don't, it's just the way it hits me, personally.) After surviving my own traumas (specifically a pretty intense gay bashing situation that dramatically changed how I perceive ideas of safety and of the average person's capacity for violence) I just can't ever truly buy that eliminating Pennywise, if you take Pennywise to be a literal entity, actually accomplishes much. We see a recurring theme in IT that Pennywise IS Derry - that the corruption of the town itself is the root of the problem. But Derry is also most small towns in North America. Even today, sadly, not much has changed. People are what they always are - emotionally driven, prone to in-group loyalty and mistrusting outsiders, violent, possessive, selfish - but more than anything else, afraid. 
> 
> So the question that then stick with me is, barring a physical confrontation with IT - if you remove that as an option and instead pursue a metaphorical IT, if you twist the script, so to speak, what's the way out? If there is no physical thing to defeat, how do you escape the cycle of misery in which you find yourself? One of (probably many) options available would be to seek an outcome similar to Eddie in the epilogue here. 
> 
> I'm not here to say it's right, or wrong - I'm certainly not here to say this is meant as an attack on the premise of the original, more literal interpretation of IT. Rather, I think, this is a curious little thought experiment, a tangent, a mental journey, towards considering the way in which we define victory and personal emancipation from trauma (and, for that matter, self-inflicted re-traumatization.) So among the many 'nobody dies' IT fics out there, many of which I have read and really enjoyed, we've got yet another, slightly different 'henry dies, everyone else lives, and IT may - or may not - have been real, and may - or may not - be a present, persistent threat, but if IT is, IT is a threat in the same way that the larger perennial threats of war/violence/domination/exploitation/etc. are a threat, and equally as unlikely to be solved by a collection of childhood friends acting on their own.'
> 
> So make of this what you will, I guess. I had fun writing it. I had a LOT of fun choosing music for it, making connections, weaving in relevant media etc. If you got even one thing out of any of that, I'm counting this as having been worth doing, for me (I'd probably have done it anyways, but it's always nice to think that, at the very least, I make stuff that makes people think.) Also I really do want to re-emphasize that I am nothing but a wandering layman in all these things, and you could probably fill an egg cup with all the stuff I actually fully know and understand about the universe. I think having multiple characters with different perspectives helped mitigate some of that in the writing process, but I'm still just a little nobody bobbing along without much sense, so I can't say with any real certainty that I think any of this is (necessarily) the 'right' answer to anything. (And I'm inclined to believe there isn't really a single 'right' answer anyway.) So take these as the ramblings of a man with way too much time on his hands.
> 
> But with all that said, I'd highly encourage anyone still reading this who is interested to just have fun with/explore whatever concepts/ideas you found compelling up to this point. Or don't - it's no skin off my nose either way. But seeing as we're all in covid-time, I feel like now's as good a time as any to start just spit-balling ideas around and seeing what sticks. I didn't expect this fic to change me as much as it did, but I gotta say, I have a new appreciation for my own role in all of this (if you've seen the Holy Mountain, think of the guy who sees everything in life as a drug trip, and how blind he is to the effort needed to contextualize or bring meaning into anything. His rampant consumption of trips themselves reminds me a lot of myself in a very unflattering way.)
> 
> I had intended this ending from the beginning, but I had expected it would be less fulfilling, because I still feel drawn to hero-narratives, to the binaries of good and bad outcomes that a fairly strict Catholic upbringing left me expecting from life. What I've realized, as I've been writing this, is that that's only one way of looking at the world, and that it's a pretty limited one, at that. 
> 
> So, what even is this? What started as a porno-lark is now... just a meditation, I guess. I've got a lot of thinking to do at this point. Thanks for coming along for the ride.


End file.
